I’ve never seen a domestic policy issue where the severity of the problem is almost entirely unknown to the public and policymakers. Second, that there hasn’t been in the national literature and exhaustive attempt to talk to the customer, to talk to the very people who are going through the educational system and have dropped out from that system and understand who they are, why they dropped out, and what we can do as a country and as educators and as policymakers to ensure more kids graduate from high school ready for college and ready for an increasingly competitive and global workforce.

One third of all public high school students fail to graduate from high school with their class in the United States. For African-Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans, it’s around fifty percent. So we have fifty percent of minorities in this country who are not graduating from public high school. When you look and these statistics are probably more familiar to you, but when you look in terms of unemployment, poverty, on death row, in prison, unhealthy, having children who in turn then go on to drop out from high school themselves, creating huge intergenerational tragedies in communities with terrific civic effects for those communities. Also the economic statistics are overwhelming. Young people who drop out of high school earn on average a million dollars less over the course of a lifetime than a college graduate.

We went into Philadelphia and Baltimore and first sat with sixteen to twenty-five year olds who had dropped out from high school in these areas. We just listened to their stories and asked them a series of probing questions and what was interesting to me was that these young people had huge aspirations and dreams. They wanted to be engineers, doctors, nurses. One wanted to be an astrophysicist. Professional athletes. Astronauts. They had big dreams and they entered the schoolhouse gate and a series of disconnects caused them to make a decision that they would then regret for the rest of their lives.

Who are these kids? Eighty-eight percent had passing grades. I found that striking. Some people say it’s teleological. Of course, these kids are getting moved from grade to grade to grade. Of course they have passing grades, but these kids actually struck us as articulate, capable young people. Especially the kids who cited real life events as the cause for their leaving school. Many of them had straight A’s and were wildly capable and for a series of reasons, I’ll outline didn’t finish their high school education. Seventy percent were confident they could graduate from high school. Sixty-six percent wanted more expected of them. More vigor. I found that startling, that these people were asking for more demands from them. Higher expectations. Eighty-one percent regretted the decision that they made and would regret it for the rest of their lives. And nearly everyone would counsel a young person in a similar situation who was thinking of dropping out to not drop out and had a little life experience finally looking back on that decision that they made and failing to delay gratification in making that instantaneous decision one day to finally leave school, that they would regret it forever. And nearly all of them wanted to go back to school and wanted to re-enter a second chance school, but not with kids who were younger than they were. They didn’t want to go back with ninth graders and tenth graders. They wanted to go back with young people their own age.

Our survey by the way, we did a nationwide survey, twenty-five locations around the country of big cities like Los Angeles, Boston, suburbs and small rural towns like Saint Clarisville, Ohio - that’s five thousand people. Why did these young people then go ahead and drop out from high school? What are they telling us about why they’re dropping out? Well my preconceived notion of why they were going to tell us they were dropping out was school failure. They couldn’t keep up. They weren’t able to meet the standard. Well that was a minority reason.

The predominant reason, nearly half the young people said school was boring, disinteresting, not making a connection between their career dreams and the life that they were experiencing in their local communities and their homes and what they were learning in the classroom. In fact we asked that question very simply and directly to kids and these articulate kids went on to say if I am interested in journalism, I should be taking English and History. If I am interested in becoming a doctor I should be focused on Biology and Chemistry and nobody in the school was making a connection between me and what I cared about and what I was learning. The most consistent finding, and by the way the answers they gave us, it was very complex, there’s no single reason that a young person drops out of high school. But there are common themes that do emerge.

The second was uninspired teaching unmotivated students. These young people really wanted more challenge. They wanted to be inspired. They wanted someone to connect with them in a meaningful way and challenge them. This one boy from Philadelphia who had dropped out who had just finished telling us that the best day in his school experience was the day when he attended all his classes. One of the teachers, only one, but one of the teachers knew his name and called on him, he knew the answer. He went home and he bragged to his grandmother about the fact that he knew something and they made a personal connection to him in the classroom. It sounds simplistic, but it’s actually fairly profound as the teachers and the educators in the room will know. And yet he goes onto make the decision to drop out of high school and talks about how the streets would call you. So sixty-six percent of these kids wanted higher expectations, more expected of them, which I actually found quite hopeful.

A third of the kids cited school failure. But let me share with you what that means in a context. Most of these kids are capable of succeeding, but they’re chronically missing school. They’re missing their classes. Eighty percent, and if I do too many statistics at you I am sorry but I like to be grounded in specifics and data so it’s not just rhetoric, but eighty percent of the young people did one hour or less of homework a night and were chronically missing their classes. Were disinterested and bored by what they were learning when they were in classes and when I think of the context of my own three children, who are in school and when Kaley missed this winter three days of class from having the flu, the phones were ringing off the hook. The school called me and my wife three or four times to ask why she wasn’t there and it took her two weeks to really catch up. She’s up to eleven o’clock every night, volumes of homework, very high standard. And I thought back to these young kids who are not in class more often than not. Not doing homework. Non-interested. Of course they are going to fail in school. So even the school failure statistic I think is contextual and we have to think of it in that way.

I think that the most tragic group that I saw and I am sure you have seen them, especially the teachers, are the young people who cited real life events for why they dropped out of high school. These were thirty-two percent of kids, young women who had babies and then they’re the only ones by the way; with most people it’s a slow process of disengagement. I’ll talk a little more about that in a minute. But these young girls who have children and I remember interviewing a number of them. They had straight A’s. Very capable. Very articulate but no means of support to enable them to stay in the classroom.

These young boys and girls, but particularly the boys who had economic pressures. They had to go out and get a job. There was no income in the home. You know the poverty stipends at some point because we have to in the country work to eventually get people eventually independent so it’s not a chronic social life fest and these young people literally had to become the caretakers in the home and the income generators and so these fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen year old kids going to work at Burger King and other places and dropped out of school.

And then the third class, also interesting, have been called a lot by the Health Care community because a lot of these kids are health care providers. They’re caregivers in the home. They go home and take care of a sick grandmother or siblings who can’t be cared for by the parents or the grandparents and so they have to drop out of school. So in a way, they were the most tragic because it wasn’t school failure. It wasn’t being disinterested or bored. It was real life events where more often than not, in the communities there are the supports, but they weren’t connected to these young people.

There was no one advocating on their behalf to keep them in the schools. What can we do about it? And what are these young people asking for? And what’s interesting is that you can actually identify a person with seventy percent accuracy, studies show, a percent in elementary school who will go on to drop out from high school. And most of the information that is predictive of dropping out is within the schoolhouse. It’s the grades and the absentee record. The connection to extracurricular activities. It was some of these young people who would report that the only things keeping their friends in the school was the football program or the play or some activity, some connection to the school. Most of these kids had no connection, no extracurricular connection to the school whatsoever.

Chronic behavioral and discipline problems. Actually everything the school could identify if it was focused and with information technology consistent with privacy concerns, you could create a system and that’s one of our recommendations and early warnings to identify these kids at first, second, and third grades. People at the foundation tell me Bridge we got to look in the womb. Okay. We can try to do that too. Pre-K. Try to identify the kids who are going to be in trouble and get them the support they need.

But these young people, eighty-one percent of them say they wanted more real world learning opportunities. Internships or just learning connections to some connection. We don’t have to take their demand for relevance and move to relevance education. We need core knowledge. We need a core curriculum. We need high standards. We need things that they don’t even know.

I took French in high school. No one, when I spoke, could identify that that was the language that I was taking. Terrible at it. I had lovely woman from actually the mountains of Kentucky who was teaching us French who was brilliant and doing a wonderful job. And I was bored. I got bad grades, spoke poorly. Just didn’t do well and then all of a sudden I disembarked from a plane in Paris, France and I walked into a meeting where my clients need to understand U.S. banking law and they don’t speak a word of English and I have to conduct that meeting in French. I come out of that meeting and I am pouring with sweat and the client says to me, “Um, Mr. Bridgeland,” in French he says, “I think you gave us good advice, but I am not sure because your French was so bad.” But six months later, because of the need, I was able to do my job, hopefully before the six months, but the point is that there’s a lot kids need to learn that is relevant that they don’t know is relevant that eventually will be hugely relevant to their life.

The other things that they want, they want an adult relationship. It’s actually kind of interesting. You see the stories of Heime Escalante and Coach Carter and the things that Hollywood holds up as models and I think that actually there is a lot of truth in it. In every focus group or survey or interview, there was an example of a principal or a teacher who would come running after a young person, literally in the middle of the night, knocking on a neighbor’s door saying, “Where is Becky? She hasn’t been in school in three days.” These heroic figures, but unfortunately it’s not the norm and also tragically it’s probably from a public policy standpoint not necessarily scalable. At least I don’t know how it is unless we have massive investments in teacher training and awaken this unique sense that you see in principals and teachers to make others become like them.

These young people wanted their parents more engaged in the schools. This is the most interesting statistic: a majority of young people who miss school were never contacted themselves by the school or the parents weren’t contacted either by the school. And then it’s the same. A majority of the young people who go on to drop out are never contacted by the school and their parents were never contacted by the school after they drop out. Do you find that just insane? And so we have public schools and high schools… there are cities all across America where a young person cannot enter a public high school where dropping out is not the norm. And we know from the influence of social and cultural dimensions with kids listening to their peers and their friends and they follow and model their behavior and they model the behavior of their parents. We know that these young people are going to model the behavior of their friends so when most of their friends are dropping out, they are probably going to drop out too. So these young people want more communication between the schools and parents and we can definitely do a better job about that.

So in our report we recommend ten specific ideas. We call them policy pathways. We don’t have any kind of lock on truth or wisdom, but we did an exhaustive, for over a year we did a review of the national literature. And I became very familiar with people like Russell Rumberger from Stanford who’s been talking about this issue for decades. And Jay Green and Chris Swanson, Gary Orfield and all these terrific people around the country who have done such phenomenal work. And based on the national literature review and then grounded in the reality of the authentic world that these young people were living in, we came up forth with ten recommendations.

The first is different schools for different students. The one size fits all, bureaucratic public high school is just not, in many cases, going to reach a lot of kids. There are eleven thousand alternative schools in the United States. It is kind of a movement. David Browder who wrote about this report in a Sunday syndicated column that reached internationally, which was great because it part of educated the public about the severity of the program, highlighted a program called Gateway to College in Portland Oregon. What’s fabulous about it is that these kids are learning about Plato and Nakamaki in ethics and Malcolm X and there’s rigor. They can’t miss class. There’s contact with the parents. There are individualized graduation plans. There’s a lot of intention in these smaller learning communities. And this population, they’re all dropouts and when you look at their statistics, how they are doing in terms of graduating these kids from high school, it’s a unrepresentative sample that is really working against you. And yet they are really doing really, really well. There are programs all over the country like this.

I go on these radio shows all the time and talk and in front of me I have examples in all these communities of these programs and more often than not, what’s saving these kids are college level courses. I’ll never forget, I was in ninth grade. I was a pretty good English student, but I was sort of at a transition point in my life and Mrs. Steele was assigning books to everybody in the class. She made me read Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and it was like this turning point in my career and I said wait a minute, she thinks I’m smart. And I never forget that and I actually went on to take a little Russian and it just inspired me. It connected to what I was interested in and just the fact that she believed in me made me feel fantastic and I think we need a little more trust and belief in the young people. And that means theme based schools and science and technology and bringing in astrophysicists to come in to talk to that young kid from Philadelphia who wanted to be an astrophysicist. It means smaller learning communities. Interdisciplinary teaming of teachers and students and in those cases, the federal research has shown that a lot of these things are actually extremely effective in increasing graduation rates and lowering drop out rates.

The second is the early warning system. We are actually trying to work with some information technology companies to develop an early warning system that will identify young people in first grade, second grade, third grade, who are in trouble. The school has identified with the information that they have who these kids are and the support they need and then we need to mobilize adult advocates. These kids want an adult relationship. It can be the parent. It can be a coach. It can be a teacher. It can be a counselor. Somebody. One person and more often than not, there is support in the school or certainly the community. Programs like Communities and Schools, a fantastic program that helps bridge the gap between communities and schools. America’s Promise, a Hundred Best Communities, is highlighted all over the country. These innovative programs that are doing such things.

So having an adult advocate and may be the mentoring movement, which is three million strong and with the new investment of two hundred and fifty million dollars that this administration provided, we need to fight for more funding this year. We’ve got more mentors who are going to be trained and we ought to make them adult advocates for these kids who need the support. Parent engagement strategies and individualized graduation plans – we’ve got to realize that in some communities we need people in schools who are equipped to reach parents who don’t speak English or who have work schedules that don’t make them available except by email at midnight. Or have other barriers. But figure out ways to get the parents in the schools and it doesn’t have to be complex, but these individualized graduation plans can be a template about what’s required to move from fourth grade to fifth grade, fifth to sixth grade, and graduate from high school.

Actually just recently, in the last two years, we have them. I have them for each of my three kids. I never had them before. They’re fantastic. I know for Kaley what’s expected of her at the end of the year so all along the way we can be in her ear every night if necessary to make sure she stays on track. They may be more in schools and communities. They are in the report.

In states, this is another striking thing that the national literature really didn’t highlight that we highlighted and was what I think prompted David Browder in the end to write the piece that he did and then Time magazine to have a focus on it. In thirty-two states in the country, you can drop out when you are sixteen or seventeen. So make this moral and financial commitment in the United States to public education through twelfth grade and our state laws say that you can drop out when you are sixteen or seventeen. It’s insane. Most of these laws were passed in an agrarian economy. Now we have this high-tech, information service, globally competitive economy where kids need to at least have a high school diploma if not more and we are letting kids drop out at sixteen. Well do the kids know anything about that? We talked to these kids in our focus group and they say yeah we signed out at sixteen. You signed out at sixteen? Yeah we can legally drop out when we were sixteen. Or under some state laws, you have to get parental consent so we went in with our parents and they signed us out. And I am like it is impossible and then we said would it help to raise the law to eighteen and then I found Angrist and Krueger from Harvard MIT did a study showing that if you simply raise the compulsory school age laws to 18 in a state, you would see a twenty-five percent reduction in drop out rates and John Dullio, who is very in depth and skilled and a social scientist who knows a great deal about statistics and samples analyzed this study and it is a very vigorous and strong study, which is a natural based experiment that people age during the school year at different times. So it is a great study.

Our view is that we should raise state law to eighteen, but it needs to be coupled with support so we don’t just return kids to the very environment that caused them to leave and so we are actually working. In the movement there have been six states in the last four to five years who have raised their compulsory school ages to eighteen and so there is some hope that I think we can get some more states to raise it to eighteen.

Finally at the federal level, we recommend three things. One is that fifty percent in people tough in socioeconomic circumstances are failing to graduate from high school. It means that fifty percent in those same tough socioeconomic circumstances are actually going onto graduation and we want to understand why that is. Actually maybe the next study we do if the federal government doesn’t do it will be looking at the flipside of what we’ve just looked at. Not the dropouts, but the young people who have succeeded. Why they succeeded and what does that tell us about policy. Second, No Child Left Behind that was drafted and had this balance between testing and graduation rate accountability, which was really important because if there’s so much focus on testing and there no focus on graduation rate accountability, you arguably have this disturbing perverse incentive to push out low performing students who will simply bring test scores down. And if you are judged in your adequate yearly progress on simply the test scores and the performance standards related to those, then we worry a lot about the effect that has on the low performing students so we are actually working to ensure that, consistent with the law, the way those regulations are implemented, that’s realigned.

Also we need disaggregated data so that we know from the parting students, how they are doing. These will be their counterparts because we know there’s this delta between the thirty-three percent and the fifty percent in the country. And finally, any opportunities to create a clearinghouse of innovative ideas so that school districts all around the United States can see some of the best ideas with what the results have been and how to implement those programs. My time is up.

I will just close by saying this is and really is a national tragedy and we need a wake up call in the country. Ours is one of many reports that has gotten some good attention and we hope that it galvanize people all across the country to do something about it. We are creating a national coalition of policy makers, educators, and others who will fight for these reforms and work in their communities to educate people about the problem and work in the common cause so five years from now, we have let’s say, eighty percent of our high school students graduating and not sixty-eight percent.