Abogados de Inmigracion

together people with such broad responsibilities and focus their attention on one single issue. But if there is one single issue worth your focused attention – it is the state of America’s high schools.
Governor Warner had a program called the Race to the GED. I would not call it a success. It is my goal to double the number of GED’s in a year and that program fell far short.
Here in America, we believe we can do the most to promote equity through education.
A few years ago, when Melinda and I really began to explore opportunities in philanthropy, we heard very compelling stories and statistics about how financial barriers kept minority students from taking their talents to college and making the most of their lives.
That led to one of the largest projects of our foundation. We created the Gates Millennium Scholars program to ensure that talent and energy meet with opportunity for thousands of promising minority students who want to go to college.
Yet – the more we looked at the data, the more we came to see that there is more than one barrier to college. There’s the barrier of being able to pay for college; and there’s the barrier of being prepared for it.
When we looked at the millions of students that our high schools are not preparing for higher education – and we looked at the damaging impact that has on their lives – we came to a painful conclusion:
Today, only one-third of our students graduate from high school ready for college, work, and citizenship.

Forty percent of high school students who are expected to graduate on time fail the GED.
The other two-thirds, most of them low-income and minority students, are tracked into courses that won’t ever get them ready for college or prepare them for a family-wage job – no matter how well the students learn or the teachers teach.
This isn’t an accident or a flaw in the system; it is the system.
The first group goes on to college and careers; the second group will struggle to make a living wage.

If Bill Gates knew the GED statistics for each state he would be shocked. New York State has been around or below the national average. California is worse. Only about eight states are doing well. Many states are around or slightly above the national average (about 1.1 percent of the target population). If each state doubled its output it would create a hardship for the system to expand.

Everyone who understands the importance of education; everyone who believes in equal opportunity; everyone who has been elected to uphold the obligations of public office should be ashamed that we are breaking our promise of a free education for millions of students.
For the sake of our young people and everyone who will depend on them – we must stop rationing education in America.
I’m not here to pose as an education expert. I head a corporation and a foundation. One I get paid for – the other one costs me. But both jobs give me a perspective on education in America, and both perspectives leave me appalled.
We have one of the highest high school dropout rates in the industrialized world. Many who graduate do not go onto college. And many who do go on to college are not well-prepared – and end up dropping out. That is one reason why the U.S. college dropout rate is also one of the highest in the industrialized world. The poor performance of our high schools in preparing students for college is a major reason why the United States has now dropped from first to fifth in the percentage of young adults with a college degree.

In the international competition to have the biggest and best supply of knowledge workers, America is falling behind.
Today, most jobs that allow you to support a family require some postsecondary education. This could mean a four-year college, a community college, or technical school. Unfortunately, only half of all students who enter high school ever enroll in a postsecondary institution.
Those who drop out have it even worse. Only 40 percent have jobs. They are nearly four times more likely to be arrested than their friends who stayed in high school. They are far more likely to have children in their teens. One in four turn to welfare or other kinds of government assistance.

So what are Bill Gates and the governors doing about it. I say if you have a conference with 88 gang members, you do more than talk to them. You help them. You give them the Official Practice Test for the GED and you find 15-25 people who can change their lives through that practice test. Talk is cheap. Give people real help.
Everyone agrees this is tragic. But these are our high schools that keep letting these kids fall through the cracks, and we act as if it can’t be helped.

But first we have to understand that today’s high schools are not the cause of the problem; they are the result. The key problem is political will. Elected officials have not yet done away with the idea underlying the old design. The idea behind the old design was that you could train an adequate workforce by sending only a third of your kids to college – and that the other kids either couldn’t do college work or didn’t need to. The idea behind the new design is that all students can do rigorous work, and – for their sake and ours – they have to.
Fortunately, there is mounting evidence that the new design works.
Our foundation has invested nearly one billion dollars so far

to help redesign the American high school. We are supporting more than fifteen hundred high schools – about half are totally new, and the other half are existing schools that have been redesigned. Four hundred fifty of these schools, both new and redesigned, are already open and operating. Chicago plans to open 100 new schools. New York City is opening 200. Exciting redesign work is under way in Oakland, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Boston.

Invest five percent in GED and you will probably see results, positive results, you have never seen before. If we had invested five cents for every dollar of scholarship money into GED, minorities and the poor probably would have more opportunities that they have never had, greater access to jobs with better benefits.

Our philanthropy is driven by the belief that every human being has equal worth. We are constantly asking ourselves where a dollar of funding and an hour of effort can make the biggest impact for equality. We look for strategic entry points – where the inequality is the greatest, has the worst consequences, and offers the best chance for improvement. We have decided that high schools are a crucial intervention point for equality because that’s where children’s paths diverge – some go on to lives of accomplishment and privilege; others to lives of frustration, joblessness, and jail.
If we keep the system as it is, millions of children will never get a chance to fulfill their promise because of their zip code, their skin color, or the income of their parents.
That is offensive to our values, and it’s an insult to who we are.
Thank you very much.

National Education Summit on High Schools