accelerated progress in the last couple of years than we've seen on an annual basis over the last decade. and to share examples of states and school districts continuing to make significant gains and the feature, as brian mentioned, leading organizations aligning their work with a civic marshal plan of action. a plan ignited by a pearson foundation, which is also a supporter of this summit and this year's report. we also show the daunting work ahead to reach national goals and pledge to provide an annual update every year through the class of 2020. i also want to take a moment to thank mary bruce of civic enterprises and joanna fox and mary mishard for the outstounding work on this year's report which represented more than a year's worth of work. [ applause ] as mrs. powell said, this year's theme is education and the economy. so our report begins there.

with unemployment still high, a skills gap, a fiscal crisis and a sticky ladder of social mobility, the economy is the nation's top problem. education is one solution. secretary duncan, as mrs. powell mentioned, who will be with us shortly, said we need to educate our way to a better economy. but also the chairman of the federal reserve ben bernanke said in the long term the best way by far to improve economic opportunity and to reduce inequality is to increase the educational attainment and skills of america's workers. so our report begins with this data because we know from the 100 summits in all 50 states that america's promise led that it was the economic case for action that helped spur policymakers and business leaders and other stakeholders to accelerate their efforts. so what's at stake? the education to jobs equation is completely flipped. a generation ago, 72% of america's jobs required high school or less. by the end of the decade, 75% of

all jobs will require high school and some college. ironically, in a time of high unemployment in the country, 53% of business leaders at large companies and 67% at small companies who are creating most of the new jobs in the country say it's difficult to find qualified u.s. workers. our tax dollars are also at stake. we know that if we were to cut the class of dropouts in half for the class of 2011, it would save $45 billion to taxpayers alone. this year's report is full of really wonderful data, economic data, not only for the nation but for every state. thanks to governor bob wise and the alliance for excellent education who will share more at tomorrow's plenary to help you do your work loek cali to make the case for addressing this national crisis. as the engine of the grad nation campaign, the civic marshal plan has to specific goals. a 90% high school graduation

rate by the class of 2020. presidents since john kennedy have set goals for the nation to boost our educational outcomes. but today this civic marshal plan is a specific plan of action that puts in place benchmarks along the way to ensure that we make progress and chart our progress over time. it takes that national goal seriously, adopts a cohort approach. the class of 2020 is in fourth grade today. the plan targets the high school dropout factories where we're losing about half of the nation's students every year. and their feeder elementary and middle schools that brian gallagher will help us chart. it focuses on data driven, research. like all 50 governors in 2005 when they came together on that graduation rate compact, we worked with organizations to encourage such big institutional plays in alignment with these benchmarks of the civic marshal

plan. high school, as we know, is insufficient. so we also highlight the goal of having the highest college attainment rates in the world. we have to double our rates from 3 in 10 who complete college to 6 in 10 by 2020. i wonder what a civic marshal plan of action for college attainment would look like in the country. so how are we doing? the nation's -- over the last decade the average freshman fwrajuation rate has risen from 72% to 75.5%. and with a half a percentage point increase since the last year. the summit would certainly be less fun if these numbers were going in the wrong direction. wisconsin became the first state to reach the 90% goal. vermont is just shy -- okay. wisconsin. [ applause ] wow. that's a lot of people from wisconsin. or a lot of enthusiasm for wisconsin. and vermont is just a .4

percentage point shy of reaching the goal. but what's significant is that these two states made about 7 percentage point gains over the last decade. so they've been working really hard to reach these goals. however, if the rate of progress from the first decade of the 21st century continues during the second, the nation's graduate rate will be closer to 80% rather than 90%. we would need to accelerate our progress three-fold from a .4 percentage point gain every year over the past decade to 1.3 percentage points per year to reach the national goal. we've made extraordinary progress. and the work of all of you in this room has made such a difference. but it's not enough. on our current pace there would still be more than 1,000 high school dropout factories in which the odds of graduating are about 50/50. the extraordinary bob balfanz will go into the data at the state level in a minute.

but we'd first like to report on the other top line progress and challenge we're making on the ten research based civic marshal below proficiency in reading. thanks to the efforts like the campaign for grade level reading that are working so diligently to accelerate this progress, the nation's fortunate to have such a strong focus. and once the feeder schools are identified, it would be interesting to see how the campaign is aligning with those students in the feeders. next you can -- as you know you

can predict in late elementary and middle school the likelihood of a student who will drop out later based on their attendance, behavior and core performance in reading and math. we partnered with the everyone fwraj waits center over the last year to actually analyze early warning systems in 16 districts and 7 states. one-third of states produce early warning reports, while another 16 report they have no plans for doing so. some states explicitly consider early warning systems as part of their state accountability systems. and the field is awash in innovation at the state and district levels. an extraordinary example of how a community-based organization actually stepped up in it shall outsi -- outside of st. louis because they wanted to make their efforts more targeted and efficient is the work of big brothers, big sisters in eastern missouri working with cape gerardo public schools. i want to do a shout out to big brothers, big sisters and particularly to becky james in that community. [ applause ]

in 2005 we heard in the context of listening sessions with dropouts they literally told us that they signed out of school on their 16th birthday. because in part the state gave them permission to do so. good research from the current chair of the president's council on economic advisers shows that increasing the age reduces dropout and boosts earning. so in the last decade alone 12 states have updated their laws from 16 to -- from 16 to 17 or 18. as the gates foundation continually reminds us, these efforts have to be linked with quality supports for struggling students and multipresident pathways to success. president obama gave us a significant boost this year in the state of union. in nearly 18 states that still permit students to drop out at 16 have legislation to update their laws as well. finally, we -- while 9 of the 10 civic marshal plan benchmarks focus on dropout prevention, it

became evident last year, thank you dorothy stonelin, wherever you are, we need to recover and reconnect the students who drop out each other who is the newest plank in our campaign. in fact, the white house council for community solutions recently found that 1 in 6, or 6.7 million of the 38.9 million youth ages 16 to 24 are disconnected from school and work. they cost taxpayers $1.6 trillion and society $4.7 trillion over their lifetimes. and they represent an extraordinarily untapped resource in terms of talent and wisdom and productivity for the country. the country has since coined the term opportunity youth to describe them and issued employer tool kits to help reconnect youth to school and work. at a white house event with the president in january set the goal of 250,000 jobs for opportunity youth as a pathway back to employment. significant efforts are under way like youth build in europe to reconnect these youth. over the last couple of days

we'll be talking about these benchmarks in more detail and seeing how we can make progress. but i hope that each of you will think about what you and your organizations can do to help move the needle on this civic marshal plan of action. it's now my pleasure to turn it over to one of the most extraordinary researchers, leaders and people i've ever met. please warmly welcome bob balfanz, co-director of the everyone graduates centers at johns hopkins university. all right. good morning. what we're here to do now is to take a look at the most recent data and use that to figure out how to get to 90%. we're doing pretty good. the evidence says we've got to step on the gas. how do we step on the gas? so we begin with some good news. as bridge said, the number of

low graduation rate high schools or dropout factories has dropped considerably since 2002. it's gone from about 2000 to about 1,500. that's a 25% improvement. that's real progress. because these are the schools if you go to the odds of graduating are only 50/50. a quarter of them were the only high school in a town. imagine what that means in the land of opportunity. the only high school in your town is one where graduation is not the norm in an era where there's no work for a high school dropout, it's really magnificent progress to say there's 25% fewer of those than a decade before. but if we go at this current rate, there's still 1,000 of these left in 2020. right? we can't still have 1,000 schools where the odds of graduating are 50/50 and basically it's a coin toss if you have a shot at a future. so we have to accelerate. a couple things in our favor. one, this most recent data from 2010 does not include the impact of a school improvement grant process and the federal

government's large effort to really target the low graduation rate high schools with significant large and transformative reforms. you're going to hear about that a little bit later this morning. second of all the data also tells us that faster than the reduction in the number of schools has been the reduction of number of students attending the schools that still exist. so that's down by about almost 800,000 students. fewer students are attending these schools now than a decade ago. so that's improved by about a third. so it tells us that not only are we having fewer of the schools, the schools that remain have fewer students in them which means there's more options available. finally in the past two years, the rate of progress has accelerated, which

look at the 25 states that have made moderate gains or moved backwards. there's a group of smaller states like idaho, iowa, montana, south dakota.

they're small states. they're already around 80%. they've just been stuck there. they have to improve less than a point a year. it's a relatively small number of kids per high school class. in fact, in these states we could put all the kids in a high school class, ninth grade class that are in danger of not graduating in a room like this. they would all fit. right? you could just imagine someone else never putting their arm around those kids and making them succeed and that seems very manageable. other states, much bigger states, there's 5,000, 10,000, 5,000, 20,000 kids in this situation. we can't put them in an auditorium. those are the states that have many. the most troublesome group really where the battle will be won or lost are in the 12 or so states that are both far away. they have to make more than a point a year. which states have done. but only a few. and they have 5,000 or more kids per class that move from drob

dropouts to graduates. 40% of all the graduates we have to get to make the national goal in 2020 are in the states. these are states that haven't moved yet. that tells us we have to put a focus here to see what does it take to gal ve niz efforts in these states while we keep working with the states that have made progress. many of the states have made progress, just from a low base in the 60s. they moved to the 70s or 80s. other states have a ways to go. keep working hard here but bring these states into the game. how do we do that? well, we're releasing this year as we did last the civic marshal plan state index for each state which goes state by state and tells them how far are they from the goal? how many more kids are we talking about? how many low graduation rate high schools do we have in how many would have to be improved a year to get to zero by 2020. also what's their fourth grade reading level? what's their eight grade math

level? how many kids are taking ap classes in their high schools and passing them? we also add the economic data. right? what is this costing the state? economic productivity and lost tax revenue and increased social cost. the large economic cost of not moving. because, remember, students drop out of high school, but they stay in the community. so the community bears the cost of the dropout crisis. by using the data to show how high that cost is, we can help gal ve niz the community, the business sector, nonprofit, faith based governmental sectors to work with the school system to really address it. once we've done that, what do we ask them to do? in the report we lay out a ten step state strategy. i'm not going to go through these one by one. i do want to take the time to talk about the first three.

and then give you a homework assignment on number nine. a couple things to keep in mind as you go back to communities and states. this year for the first year we're finally measuring high school graduation rates the same way in all states and all districts using the accurate measure which is how many entering ninth graders get a diploma four years later or states can also measure after five or six years if they ask for a waiver. minus schools transferring. adding students coming into the school. we can actually now know within districts, within states which schools are making big progress to learn from and which schools are still struggling and need more help and attention. this data is just coming out now. about 35 states you can get this somewhere on their website. still often a little buried. we're going to be trying in the next couple months to put it all together on our website so it's an easy click. by the end of the year all states except for two or three that got waivers should be out. this is powerful, galvanizing

local data. create a map in your community, your state, how many kids and how many skooms have to improve for us to meet this goal. let's target your efforts and measure them to really have strategic, focused impact. the second thing that's happening is this. almost all states, 11 have them already. 24 in the pipeline right now. most will follow. are applying for waivers from the no child left behind act. in these waivers states are gaining collectibility to move around the federal money which provides an opportunity to use it in a more targeted, strategic way. but in return for this they're pledging to reform their lowest 5% of schools plus any school with a graduation gap. right? so those are our schools. we have to make sure the states use this freedom wisely. they do it to show -- use evidence based procedures. in the report it's a group of things together. you need to to evidence based

whole school turnaround transformation of the lowest performing schools. high schools and feeder middles. you need to enhance student supports in those schools. right? because those kids need a good lesson every day and something else. we have to bring in that something else in order to enhance student support which is going to really involve bringing in often external nonprofit partners, many of which you're going to hear today, many of which have stepped up as brian said using common metrics. it really moved up their game. using evidence based procedures we need to bring those adults into schools and use an early warning system so we target those adults and the school on the kids most at need as soon as they're starting to show any sign of trouble. that's what you should be looking for as states are moving to use their dollars and address this problem. are they enhancing student support? are they using early warning systems? are they creating funding streams to pay for it while holding them accountable? the other thing to watch out for is that as they build these state performance indexes, which

in many ways are going to be very exciting, that they get the mechanics right and graduation rate accountability is still held at the highest outcome for high schools. you need two things to happen. we need to graduate all our kids. they've got to graduate prepared for college and career. neither one of those by itself is good, right? we could increase our college readines readiness. we'd still have a quarter of our kids not graduating. that's not good. there's no work for those kids. we could lower standards and graduate all our kids and they couldn't do any work anyway. that's not good either. these are complex systems. we have to keep our eye on it to make sure graduation rate accountability is still at a high level. arguably this is the first year as a nation we have a good graduation rate accountability. we have an accurate measure. all states had to put in substantial progress goals. and we can't lose that as soon as we gain it. we have to keep our eye on that. finally, our homework assignment. chronic absenteeism.

this is the year to breakthrough on the issue. any district or state or community that has the dropout crisis usually as an unacknowledged absenteeism problem beginning as early as kindergarten. until we recognize it, we don't act against it. we don't see it. the truth is, we don't see it because we don't measure it. we don't measure it because no one's asking for it. the school's measure is a average daily attendance of the school. turns out this is one case where 90% is not an "a." we're hard wired almost genetically to hear 90% equals good. right? a school can have a 90%, 91%, 92%, 93% average daily attendance and a 40% literacy rate. the truth is, you could have 90% avrmg daily attendance and have one fifth of your kids missing a month or more of school. different kids on different days

equallying that 90%. if you dig beneath that 40% literacy rate you're probably finding half those kids aren't coming to school regularly. until they come to school regularly, it doesn't matter how great the lesson is because they're not there to get it. we really have to campaign at a sucal level, at a time level to how many kids are missing a month or more of school, about 10%, in a week or less. two incredibly understa metrics. once we have those thinks, the community can galvanize against. we have to get our kids to school on a regular basis. with that in mind i want to thank you. i think we turn it back over now to john bridgeland to talk about some powerful stutional plays. [ applause ] sfwl fantastic, bob. not only wonderful data but a homework assignment. also great to know the 13 states where the battle will be won or lost over the next decade to reach this national goal.

as brian gallagher highlighted at the outset of this plenary session, the theory of change of the civic marshal plan is to highlight groups that are beating the odds and makie inin ground breaking progress on one or more of the benchmarks. many case studies in the report that are featured this year, for example double digit gains in rural maryland. thank you, betty morgan. to significant progress in georgia, in atlanta, in houston and in alabama show us the pathways forward on how these states and school districts are beating the odds. i want to thank the leadership council members of the civic marshal plan to build a grad nation. all the organizations listed here for their extraordinary work over the last year working in partnership. this is their civilic marshal plan. it was developed in partnership with them. to get a better sense of how organizations are putting a

stake in the fwround aligning with the civic marshal plan and achieving real results, we're now going to hear a few of the boldest and most promising what we call big institutional plays this year which are also featured in the report. our first big institutional alignment with the civic marshal plan is the corporation for public broadcasting's american graduate initiative presented by pat harrison, their dynamic president and ceo. i can tell you, i think it's one of the most exciting developments we've had in the last year. fwrad nation has seen the power of media to raise awareness and spur action to address the high school dropout challenge across the country from little towns like richmond, indiana, to new york city. the corporation for public broadcasting has made significant investments in digital media, reaching diverse communities and creating a dialogue to engage local communities. pat will be followed by ninasazer o donl, vice president for education at the united way

worldwide. and max miller, co-ceo of big brothers, big sisters of america. in addition to brian gallagher's announcement from united way this morning on the feeder schools, united way and big brothers, big sisters are taking their long standing partnership a step further to accelerate their progress on the civic marshal plan. and, finally, rounding out the beginning with extraordinary leadership from one of the most significant companies in america, at&t, we'll hear from beth shiroishi. please, first warmly welcome the ceo of the corporation for public broadcasting, pat harrison.

i want to thank bob for all he's doing to help america become a grad nation. it's great to be with so many people concerned with america's young people and putting that concern into action through america's promise alliance. as alma powell says in the grad nation report, we can't afford excuses. and america's promise alliance is one of the most effective and largest partnerships increasing champions for the nation's children and champions never make excuses. they do work toward the mission every single day. and our kids really need these champions. we should think of them as our kids. our best and brightest. because that's how they start out. believing that they do have a bright future. believing that they can be among

the best. who do eventually graduate. but somewhere along the way, they lose their way. and when that happens, they and we all lose. because, as their success goes forward or it falters, or it fails, so goes our nation. let me tell you what the nation's public media station, radio television online and in the community, are doing to address the dropout challenge through an initiative we launched last year called american graduates, let's make it happen. i want to thank michael powell for his eloquent words inspiring public media to action at that launch. working in partnership with america's promise and guided by the civic marshal plan, we began with a very strong foundation.

a core part of public media's mission, which is education. because for decades we have provided a safe place where children can learn commercial free and for free. we have improved reading readiness. especially for children in high need communities through our redred dy to learn program. we have digital media resources through pbs learning media that's correlated to the common course standards. now public media is utilizing our resources, our trusted content, our connection to community, our boards of civic and business leaders and our audience in ways that really can help kids stay on the path to a high school diploma. and basically in ways that are specific