On March 1 President Obama announced plans to increase high school graduation rates and ensure graduates are ready to succeed in college and the workplace.
The President has set aside $3.3 billion to pay for transformational changes in schools that have graduation rates below 60 percent. An additional $900 million will be available for School Turnaround Grants.
This announcement was made at the GradNation event sponsored by the America’s Promise Alliance program, a non-profit organization created by Gen. Colin Powell, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and former Secretary of State.
According to the America’s Promise Alliance Web site, 1.3 million students drop out of high school each year. This means nearly one-third of all high school students in the U.S. do not graduate.
In Wisconsin, 7,000 students drop out of high school each year, giving Wisconsin a graduate rate of 89 percent.
The Alliance will sponsor 105 summits across the U.S. to allow all 50 states and 55 of the nation’s largest cities to develop plans to reduce dropout rates.
Administrators and teachers from 44 school districts met in Pewaukee on March 2 for Wisconsin’s Graduation Summit.
The Wisconsin Graduation Summit brought together representatives of schools that were doing well and schools that were not doing so well so they could learn from one another.
“Most of the reports that come out show Wisconsin has a high or the highest graduation rate in the nation,” Daniel Wiltrout of the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction’s Office of Student Services, Prevention and Wellness, said. “But, 7,000 kids are not graduating when they’re supposed to.”
The purpose of the Graduation Summit was to raise awareness of the dropout problem.
“Students of color and students with disabilities show up disproportionately in the state’s statistics,” Wiltrout said. “This needs to be addressed.”
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