Building a Brighter Future

Alma Powell, the current chairwoman for America’s Promise Alliance, asks Northern Virginians to play an active role in the education of our children

By Natalie Lescroart

Courtesy of America’s Promise Alliance

Challenging America to make children a national priority, America’s Promise Alliance was born almost 15 years ago. The D.C.-headquartered growing alliance—now comprised of more than 300 corporations, nonprofits and assorted advocacy groups—works to ensure all young people can graduate from high school ready for college, work and to live as productive members of society.

One in every three American students fails to graduate from high school with a diploma. More than 1.2 million students drop out each year. But unlike the rest of the nation, where American Indian and black students have on average the highest dropout rates of minority groups, in Virginia the minority group with the highest dropout rate is Hispanics (19.1 percent), followed by black students (11.3 percent), then white students (7.9 percent). In light of these alarmingly high dropout rates, America’s Promise Alliance introduced the Dropout Prevention Campaign in April of 2008. Under the leadership of chairwoman and McLean resident Alma Powell, 72, the alliance has held over 100 summits across the nation in order to develop solutions and preventative action plans. Here, Powell addresses the impact of dropouts.

Your husband, Gen. Colin Powell, became the founding chairman of America’s Promise Alliance back in 1997. Since 2004, you have served as the acting chair of the group. What inspired you to take on such a large role in this particular initiative?
I was concerned when someone casually said to me, ‘Whatever happened to that thing that your husband started?’ I knew we needed to raise our profile again. Unfortunately, the general American public has ADD. If you don’t keep things before them, then they forget; and this is not an issue that we can forget.

How do Virginia high schools’ dropout rates compare to those of other states and the nation as a whole?
They do very well—particularly, of course, in the Northern Virginia area, but in other sections of the state there are problems, as there are everywhere.

According to the Alliance, nearly 50 percent of black and Hispanic students do not complete high school on time. What sorts of class or minority trends do you notice in Northern Virginia, as one of the most notably affluent regions in the United States?
The problems in Northern Virginia are not as great as they are in other places. But in communities—like Prince William County—where there’s a high concentration of Hispanics and African-Americans, there’s a problem. The underlying problem is usually poverty. With Hispanics, it is often because they are the children of immigrants, who themselves are not educated and who have come here to work hard and don’t have the same urgency for education. In areas that are primarily low-income, that is where you are going to find the biggest problems.

While Fairfax County boasts some of the top schools in the Region, T.C. Williams High School in nearby Alexandria has been designated as one of the persistently lowest-achieving schools under the new state definition. What might you attribute this to?
Well, again, the diversity of their school population. T.C. Williams was not always the lowest-performing school. They—up until a few years ago—were tops in how they handled their population. Now, the latest statistic about T.C. Williams reflects the growing diversity in that area. It is a very diverse school. However, there are some very good programs at T.C. Williams to address the needs of those Hispanic young people and the African-American kids. A few years ago, Alexandria was one of our 100 best communities because of its dedication to improving the lives of its young people through initiatives like the Early Childhood Commission and Youth Policy Commission, which was established by the Alexandria City Council and helps fund programs for the city’s youth. In addition, the Center for Alexandria’s Children opened a few years ago to help improve the child welfare service delivery system in the city. This one-stop facility provides a place to coordinate the investigation, prosecution, treatment and prevention of child abuse in a safe, child-friendly building.

Have you seen improvements over the years?
Yes. We have seen a lot of improvement. We usually see the problems advertised and written about; but, underneath that, there are hundreds of people who are working with young people and getting good results. Those things don’t get a lot of airing.

It’s clear that dropping out of high school has negative consequences for students and families. how might a prevalence of dropouts affect a community?
It’s an economic issue. The average high-school dropout earns about $14,000 a year. High-school graduates earn an average of $25,000 a year. It’s tough to make ends meet on $14,000, so this impacts the entire community—with social services that are needed and with a large number of people not being able to contribute to the economy. That’s one of the things we’d like to point out nationwide: Taking care of high-school dropouts costs the nation almost as much as the bailout. So it’s in our biggest interest to be sure that we have people ready for work. Poverty rates are three times higher for high-school dropouts, and that just contributes nothing to a community.

As dropout rates remain high, is there any room for blame? Whose responsibility is it to make sure that students stay in school? The students themselves, their parents, their schools, their surroundings?
It’s a combination of all of that. Right now we’re focusing on teachers and schools, but schools are just one part of it. Young people have to come to school ready to learn, and that involves being well-fed, having good health habits and having been nurtured at home. But there is no one scapegoat for the high-school dropout rate. To alleviate the problem, it requires the entire community. The president has said that he’s contributing a lot of money to education, but money is not just the problem. It involves all of us, surrounding young people with the basic things that they need so that they have the confidence, strength and ability to learn.

On a governmental level, what steps need to be taken to allow the area’s youth to prosper in the coming years?
The government is another problem because—especially in these economic times—they have to balance the budget, and unfortunately, the first programs that get cut are school programs and programs for children. Fewer teachers and larger classes are not a formula for success. I cannot speak to what it is they need to do, because they have a fiscal reality that they need to face, but they have to keep in mind the whole time that we have to ensure the future of kids, because that’s our future. It’s an overall picture. If we don’t try to cut this high-school dropout rate in half and provide young people with a way to make a living, then we don’t have a very good future ahead of us.

How can we put an end to this?
By taking an interest in young people—as early as preschool. If you go online, you will find a lot of programs—and there are a lot in Northern Virginia—that are designed to provide young people with the basic things that they need. … So for example, you can go to a nursery school to read to kids. That’s a very big thing: reading to young people. Reading to preschoolers helps them to be ready to read themselves and to know the basics of language and to have ideas. It doesn’t require an expensive program; they’re just basic things that we can do.

Both the president and Gov. Bob McDonnell have pushed for more charter schools within the nation’s education system. Do you think the focused curriculum of charter schools would help or hinder THE dropout prevention?
In the charter schools that we have been associated with, it helps an awful lot. Now, there are good charter schools, and there are some bad charter schools. It’s just like you have with public schools—it depends on the staff and the philosophy of the school. But, overall, charter schools do a very good job. First of all, because they are smaller, children have more individual attention. They can do things that a public school cannot do; for example, having a longer school day and a longer school year. There’s really not much reason for our children to be out of school all summer. When that calendar was formed, we were an agricultural society, and young people had to go work in the field. That doesn’t exist anymore, and so for three months you have kids who are not challenged academically unless they have parents who see to it. My kids went to school in Prince William County—year-round. There were four vacations in a year instead of that big three-month thing in the center. It was great. By the time they were getting restless and tired of school, it was time for a vacation. The thing that happened was there was no break between each grade. You didn’t have to review all of the first month of school to bring them up to snuff from what they had forgotten over the summer. … So, it’s fine for us to advocate for charter schools and the good jobs that they do, but we still have to think about public education—the kids that don’t go to charter school. Are our schools going to continue to give them everything that they need? I don’t know that answer, but I do know that I have seen some very effective charter schools.

(September 2010)