Webinar Focuses On Economic Benefits Of Reducing Dropout Rate
WASHINGTON - The Alliance for Excellent Education and the Campaign for High School Equity will host a live webinar to release these new findings and to discuss the challenges of improving high school graduation rates among students of color and what doing so could mean for local communities, as well as the students themselves.
Years of data have consistently underscored the persistent graduation gap between America’s students of color and their peers. The most recent estimate shows that high school graduation rates for African American, Latino, and American Indian students hover only slightly higher than 50 percent. This is more than 20 percentage points lower than that of their white peers. In addition to the moral imperative to provide every student with an equal opportunity to pursue the American dream, there is also a strong economic argument for helping more students of color graduate from high school. Lowering the dropout rate brings a range of benefits to a community, including increased earnings potential, home and auto sales, and other important economic indicators for communities and states. Earlier this year, the Alliance for Excellent Education documented the benefits of reducing the dropout rate for all students in the nation’s largest metropolitan areas. Building on this work, the Alliance is now able to estimate the economic benefits of reducing the dropout rate among students of color in these metro areas. When: Tomorrow, July 7, 2010, 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm EST Agenda: 2:00 pm Welcome and Introductions/Presentation of the Findings
Gov. Bob Wise
President, Alliance for Excellent Education
2:20 pm Panel Discussion on the Findings
Mr. Michael Wotorson
Executive Director, Campaign for High School Equity
Mr. Mike Fernandez
Vice President, Corporate Communications and External Relations, State Farm®
Mr. Richard Wells
Vice President, State and Community Dropout Prevention Summits, America’s Promise Alliance
2:45 pm Question and Answer Period
Gov. Bob Wise (moderator)
3:00 pm Webinar Concludes
The report includes detailed findings for each of the forty-five largest metropolitan areas in the United States: Albuquerque, Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore, Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Cleveland, Colorado Springs, Columbus, Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, Denver, Detroit, El Paso, Fresno, Honolulu, Houston, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, Kansas City (MO), Las Vegas, Los Angeles-Long Beach, Louisville, Memphis, Miami, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Nashville, New York City, Oklahoma City, Omaha, Philadelphia, Phoenix-Mesa, Portland (OR), Sacramento, San Antonio, San Diego, San Francisco-Oakland, San Jose, Seattle, Tucson, Tulsa, Virginia Beach, Washington, DC, and Wichita.
To participate in the July 7 webinar, please complete the registration information at http://www.all4ed.org/events/WebinarEconBenefits070710. A link to the actual webcast page will be sent to the email address you provide.
Any problems or questions regarding registration should be directed to Jason Amos at jamos@all4ed.org or (202) 828-0828. If you would like to ask a question during the webinar, email your question to Jason Amos at jamos@all4ed.org.
Few people realize the impact that high school dropouts have on a community’s economic, social, and civic health. Business owners and residents—in particular, those without school-aged children—may not be aware that they have much at stake in the success of their local high schools. Indeed, everyone—from car dealers and realtors to bank managers and local business owners—benefits when more students graduate from high school.
Nationally, more than seven thousand students become dropouts every school day. That adds up to almost 1.3 million students annually who will not graduate from high school with their peers as scheduled. In addition to the moral imperative to provide every student with an equal opportunity to pursue the American dream, there is also an economic argument for helping more students graduate from high school.
To better understand the various economic benefits that a particular community could expect if it were to reduce its number of high school dropouts, the Alliance for Excellent Education (the Alliance), with the generous support of State Farm®, analyzed the local economies of some of the nation’s largest cities and their surrounding areas. Using a sophisticated economic model developed by Economic Modeling Specialists Inc., an Idaho-based economics firm specializing in socioeconomic impact tools, the Alliance calculated economic projections tailored to the forty-five largest metro regions and released those findings on January 12, 2010. On June 9, 2010, the Alliance released findings on an additional forty-three metro areas.
These projections estimate the gross increase in important local economic factors such as individual earnings, home and auto sales, job and economic growth, spending and investment, tax revenue, and human capital based on two scenarios:
1) Reducing by half the number of local students from the Class of 2008 who failed to graduate with their class.
2) Reducing by one thousand the number of local students from the Class of 2008 who failed to graduate with their class.
To see how cutting the dropout rate in half in the nation’s fifty largest cities—and the metropolitan areas that surround them—would benefit the nation’s economy as a whole, read the national analysis.
To view the one-page document of the economic benefits for a particular city/metro area, please click on it in the list below.
