America’s Promise Alliance Chair Alma Powell Testifies before Senate Subcommittee on the State of the Nation’s Children
6/8/2010
America’s Promise Alliance Chair Alma J. Powell testified this morning in front of the United States Senate Subcommittee on Children and Families. The hearing, titled “The State of the American Child” sought commentary from national experts on the most challenging issues facing today’s young people and how Congress and the American public can help solve them. Mrs. Powell joined three other individuals including: Jack Lund, president and CEO, YMCA of Greater New York, NY; Harry Holzer, PhD of Georgetown University and the Urban Institute; and Elaine Zimmerman of the Connecticut Commission on Children in providing expert testimony.
The full written testimony is below:
Supporting our Children, Lifting our Nation
Testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Children and Families
Alma J. Powell, Chair, America’s Promise Alliance
June 8, 2010
REMARKS
Chairman Dodd, Ranking Member Alexander, and members of the Committee, thank you for the opportunity to testify on this very important issue.
Today our nation faces many urgent priorities: the economy, healthcare, national security, global competitiveness. But I would say that one of the most important issues we face as a nation is one that impacts all of these priorities – and that is the well being of our children.
Sadly, our children are often overlooked when addressing many urgent issues of the time. But let there be no doubt – meeting the needs of our most vulnerable youth means building a stronger, safer, healthier, and more equitable country.
America’s Promise Alliance
As you may know, my husband General Colin Powell was founding chair of America’s Promise Alliance, the organization I now chair. The Alliance grew out of the President’s Summit for America’s Future in 1997, where all the living presidents and Nancy Reagan signed a declaration stating that: “As Americans and as Presidents, we ask every caring citizen to pledge individual commitments of citizen service, voluntary action, the efforts of their organizations, or commitments to individual children in need. By doing so, this nation pledges the fulfillment of America’s promise for every American child.”
Today, we fulfill that promise through more than 400 national partner organizations and their local affiliates – aggressively addressing the high school dropout and college readiness crisis that plagues this country. The dropout crisis is a dramatic symbol of how we as a nation are failing our young people.
Creating a Grad Nation
On March 1, I joined President Obama, Secretary Duncan and my husband at an event at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to officially embark on the most ambitious campaign the Alliance has ever undertaken – the Grad Nation Campaign.
Through Grad Nation we will mobilize Americans of all ages, income levels and ethnicities – in all 50 states and in communities large and small – to end the high school dropout crisis and prepare our young people for the 21st century workforce. We will also mobilize our national partners and their local affiliates to create powerful, cross-sector solutions, especially in communities and neighborhoods that are home to our most vulnerable children.
This is a critical moment in time. And it’s time to turn a moment into a movement.
The Magnitude of the Crisis
The statistics are tragic. One of every three students fails to graduate from high school in this country. That’s over one million students a year. Among minority students, the problem is even more severe, with barely half of African American and Hispanic students graduating from high school.
Lack of readiness for college and the 21st-century workforce is an equally serious threat. As we all know, a high school diploma is no longer enough in our global economy. Yet only about one-third of our high school graduates have enough of the skills required for success in college and the workforce. And only 10 percent of minority students who enroll in college will graduate. Just one in ten.
The Cost to Our Country
The high school dropout crisis not only takes a toll on our children, but it also takes an enormous and unsustainable toll on our country. Consider the students from the class of 2009. Had all of them stayed in school and graduated, our economy would gain more than $320 billion over their working lives. That’s $320 billion in higher wages, greater consumer buying power, and increased tax contributions.
And this is only part of the cost. It does not count the cost of remedial education. It does not count the cost of social programs and prisons. It does not count the cost to our healthcare system. Because high school dropouts on average have more health problems than graduates, it has been estimated that our nation would save $174 billion in healthcare costs had all of the Class of 2009 graduated.
Mr. Chairman, this is an economic as well as a moral crisis.
A Solvable Problem
But I want to make it very clear: this is a crisis we can solve. We have seen what success looks like when sound policies and best practices are paired with strong community support.
It starts with better schools. But we must also recognize that many of the roots of the dropout crisis lie in a shortage of the fundamental supports – or what we call the Five Promises – in the lives of our children. In fact, the dropout crisis exemplifies our failure to ensure that our children have the building blocks that make for success.
We support education reform as a keystone to improving graduation rates and readiness for college and work. But too many children come to school not able to learn. We must couple reform with efforts to transform young lives by ensuring that children not only have a good education, but also caring adults in their lives, safe neighborhoods, after-school programs, access to health care and opportunities to help others.
Over the past two years, America’s Promise Alliance has been steadily building awareness and momentum on the dropout issue – and today the Silent Epidemic is no longer silent. We have convened Dropout Prevention Summits in all 50 states and 55 additional cities, bringing together leaders from all sectors of the community.
Now we must turn awareness into sustained, results-driven action.
Focus on Lowest Performing High Schools and their Communities
So how can we achieve success? We know that just 2,000 high schools (12%) produce over half of the high school dropouts in this country. For that reason, we are focusing special effort on these low-performing schools and their surrounding neighborhoods.
With our business and non-profit partners, we are building powerful cross-sector collaborations to focus needed resources in these 2,000 neighborhoods, to strengthen these lowest performing schools, and to help our most vulnerable children receive the Five Promises.
What does it mean to strengthen low-performing schools and low-resource neighborhoods? It means increasing the presence of caring adults who are involved in everything from reading to young children to after-school tutoring and mentoring to service-learning opportunities. It means empowering and encouraging parents to fulfill their indispensable role as active partners in their children’s learning. It means making sure more young people have consistent access to healthcare. It means quality pre-school available to every child. It means providing more places after school and during the summer where children can be safe and use their time productively.
And it means focusing not just on high school students. Half of all young people who drop out of high school do so by the 10th grade. The majority of those who drop out say they began disengaging from school during their middle-school years. And one of the most reliable predictors of future dropouts is third-grade reading scores. We have to support at-risk children from an early age. And we must stay involved every step of the way.
National Council on Children
We must also look at this problem with more focus. I mentioned that the needs of our children are often overlooked as this nation addresses urgent priorities. In order to raise the visibility of children in federal policy and solidify our commitment to the nation’s future, we need a coordinated, national action plan.
A critical first step toward reversing this downward trend is for Congress to create a National Council on Children, focusing on reestablishing America as a global frontrunner in child well-being.
A National Council on Children would serve as a forum on behalf of children and function as a permanent independent entity within the federal government. It would conduct a comprehensive study to assess the needs of children, submit a report to the president and Congress, and make recommendations on how to best address the needs of our youngest citizens. Upon completion of the study and issuance of recommendations, the Council would annually assess the nation’s performance in meeting its goals, and propose additional improvements.
In 1997, a similar panel proved to be a remarkable success story for America’s young people, spawning the enactment of the Child Tax Credit, improvements to the Earned Income Tax Credit, the creation of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, and other initiatives that have drastically improved child health and well-being. But today a new generation of children once again faces serious problems that threaten this progress. The creation of a permanent Council tasked with annually assessing the status of children will ensure continuous, measurable benefits for our nation’s most precious resource.
The Civil Rights Issue of Our Time
Mr. Chairman, many say education is the Civil Rights crisis of our time, and they are right. Our values are at risk when students’ chances of graduating from high school are heavily affected by where they live and the resources available to them.
Education is the passport to full participation in the American Dream. But right now that dream is being dashed by a harsh reality. Millions of our young people have little chance of being part of an opportunity society simply because they lack access to the resources that would enable them to succeed.
Conclusion
The state of our children is not simply a failure of government or of schools; it is a failure of all of us. Each and every one of us must be part of the solution.
Today, I ask that you challenge Congress to work with us to build a strong and sustained movement. Individual by individual, community by community, we CAN create a Grad Nation and show our most vulnerable young people that America is indeed the land of opportunity.
We know what to do. We need focus and commitment. Today it is more a matter of summoning the will than finding the way. And we have no option but to summon the will – for ourselves, for our children, and for our nation.