Recommended Reading: Grad Nation 2015 report

Visit this link to read the "2015 Building a Grad Nation Report: PROGRESS AND CHALLENGE IN ENDING THE HIGH SCHOOL DROPOUT EPIDEMIC"
This report is released annually, by the Alliance for Excellent Education, America’s Promise Alliance, Civic Enterprises, and the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University. It shows detailed progress toward the GradNation goal of a national on-time graduation rate of 90 percent by 2020.

On the home page you can click into subsections titled "Explore this Report". Look at some of the "drivers" causing gains, or lack of gains, in graduation rates, like poverty, big cities, and big states.

Download the report and use this as research and recommended reading in groups who are focused on closing the opportunity gaps in Chicago and other cities and states.

100% of Seniors Graduate. What does this mean?

Over the past couple of year’s I’ve seen statements from several different organizations saying “100% of my seniors graduated from high school”. Some added “and went to college”.

With the emphasis on outcomes I can see how this would be a meaningful statement. But is it also a misleading statement?

Here’s a chart I created several years ago showing the 20-25 year role of business, family, non profits, educators, etc. in helping youth move from birth to age 20-25 when they should be starting jobs and careers.

When someone says “all my seniors graduated” they are not telling you at what age level those seniors were when they joined that mentoring or tutoring program. They are not telling the demographic background. They are not telling the academic history.

Thus, you could imply that this organization that claims to serve several hundred young people has built a strategy that gets those young people involved at an early age, like middle school, and keeps 100% (ALL) of them involved through high school and they ALL graduate and they ALL go to college.

If someone working with young people living in high poverty is telling you they accomplish this, I think they are leaving out some important information. There’s too much transition of families in poverty for all youth to be able to stay with a program located in one neighborhood for 4 to six years. There are too many diseases that affect youth in poverty, such as Asthma and Diabetes, or gang violence and/or teen pregnancy, and too many young people getting caught up in the juvenile justice system for programs to be able to keep 100% of youth enrolled for four to six consecutive years. And, if a program starts with youth in elementary school, this is even more of a challenge.

I’ve asked some program leaders what they mean when they claim 100% graduated and they tell me that this really is a measure of those who survived to become seniors, who then stayed with the program through the year, and were accepted for college in the spring. Depending on the level of support a program is able to offer, at what age students join, and what the demographics and family support of the youth is, programs should show different levels of year-to-year retention, but seldom 100%

I may be wrong. However, I don’t see attendance charts on many program web sites. I don’t see “theory of change” strategies with graphics like the one above that shows when a youth joins a program and what they do to help them through high school, then through college, vocational school and into jobs.

I also don’t see information showing the demographics and academic background of young people when they join a program. Using maps to demonstrate where youth in a program live is one way to show this. Providing an overview showing the percent of youth in a program living under the poverty line is another way. Showing what percent of youth in a program attend private schools would be another indicator that would differentiate the youth served by different programs in different places.

That does not mean there are not lots of programs who do have these strategies and this information, but do not share this information on their web sites. Thus, when some leaders boast “100 percent of seniors graduate” we’re making assumptions about what these programs are really doing and what impact they are having.

If you’re evaluating programs and/or choosing between different programs to make funding decisions, it makes a huge difference in the work required if a program starts working with teens when they are juniors or seniors in high school vs if they start working with youth when they are between 7th and 9th grade, or in elementary school.

It makes a huge difference in the services a program needs to provide if a program has recruited youth who already have great academic credentials or potential and/or are already attending private high schools vs serving youth who have not yet navigated the difficult transition from adolescence to high school.

As we head to the National Mentoring Summit and beyond through the rest of 2013, I encourage programs to talk about this topic in blogs, social media and webinars. I encourage you to apply graphics like this (seem more here) to show what age range youth are when they join the program, and what retention they have from year to year, as well as what number then graduate and enter college as a result of the support a program and its volunteers provide.

It would be great to see MENTOR or other leadership groups take on this topic.

If you’re a business, college, or local media, you can help by asking for this information, and by offering your time and talent to help programs create graphics, theory of change documents, and measurement tools that they can use to track year to year participation and retention for their own process improvement evaluations, and for building a more uniform way that all programs demonstrate what they are accomplishing and who they are serving.

I’m hosting the next Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conference on June 7, 2013 in Chicago. I invite programs to organize a workshop or panel discussion to talk of ways they demonstrate impact and show their theory of change. I invite consultants to volunteer to facilitate a discussion of what metrics programs could show that would attract more consistent support from business leaders and volunteers. The web site for the conference is http://www.tutormentorconference.org

This is also something that can be discussed in online forums such as the ones I host at http://tutormentorconnection.ning.com and on Linked in and Facebook.

If others are hosting such discussions please post links to them so others can find you and participate.

Keeping Attention Focused Throughout Year

I worked in retail advertising for a big company in the 1970s and 1980s and we spent millions of dollars every week to keep potential customers coming to our stores. If we want to do more to help kids in poverty we need to find ways to keep expanding the number of people who are offering time, talent and dollars to support schools and non-school tutor/mentor programs in thousands of locations.

In the social sector we don't have millions of dollars for advertising, thus we need to find other ways to build and sustain public support and the flow of needed operating resources to all of the places where people are working to help kids move through school and into careers. I created this video to illustrate the need for 12-month strategies that repeat from year-to-year. I hope you'll find time to view it and share it with others.



As you view the video, keep in mind the following two images:

Birth-to-work is a 20 to 25 year journey. It's difficult for most kids, but much more difficult for kids born into neighborhoods of highly concentrated, segregated poverty. Kids only grow a day and a year at a time. There are no quick fixes. Thus, we need to find innovative ways to keep attention focused and support available in thousands of locations.




Instead of focusing on single solutions, focus on the big question: "What are all the things we need to be doing to assure that youth born in 2013 are starting jobs and careers by 2038?" This question needs to be asked over and over, by leaders in business, politics, universities, faith groups, philanthropy, and by individuals who are concerned with the future of our democracy, our economy, and the millions of young people born in high poverty neighborhoods every year.

As you talk with others, read books and articles, and come up with information that supports this "birth to work" goal, find a way to share your thoughts by posting links or ideas in web libraries, blogs or social media forums. Below is a map of the information library of the Tutor/Mentor Connection, which has been growing since the late 1970s.

You can find this graphic here.

Collecting, organizing and drawing attention to this information on a regular basis is a huge job. It cannot be done by a single person, or a single small organization. Other owners are needed to support this strategy. Sponsors are needed to keep it going in 2013 and 2014.

View this page to learn more of ways you can help.

General Powell - "This isn't charity."

I encourage you to view this video interview of General Colin Powell by Tom Brokaw which was part of the Education Nation Summit held in September 2012.

In this you'll hear General Powell say "This isn't charity. You're doing it in your own self-interest." and "We're not asking you for charity. We're asking you to invest in your own future."

Sounds like the message I've been sending to business leaders, volunteers and donors for the past 18 years.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Last night I attended an event at Northwestern University where Peter Edelman, author of "So Rich, So Poor: Why It’s So Hard to End Poverty in America" talked about his book. Meet Dr. Edelman and hear his views at this site. During the event I posted some of Edelman's comments on Twitter, under the hashtag #sorichsopoor.

In his final comments Edelman said "Our democracy is in danger." He concluded by paraphrasing a quote by Abraham Joshua Heschel,one of the leading Jewish theologians and Jewish philosophers of the 20th century, when he said "We are not all guilty, but we are all responsible."

Herchel also said "All it takes is one person… and another… and another… and another… to start a movement"

This has been what I've been writing about for years. Network building is the process of adding one person, and another and another....until at some point you have an army. The process of network building can be enhance by a greater flow of talent and dollars.

When General Powell said "This is not charity" I take it to mean that you don't just look for organizations with a 501-c-3 tax-exempt designation to support. You look for organizations that have a long-term track record and a vision of community building that focuses on building and sustaining constantly improving "birth to work" support systems in all the places where they are needed.

Follow the command of General Powell and the advise of Abraham Joshua Heschell and provide the talent, time and dollars needed to help me build the social problem solving platform I describe on this page.

Dog Eating Too Much of Education Conversation?

This week I've spent at least 10 hours listing to on-line discussions focused on helping more young people graduate with the preparation they need for college and to compete in a global marketplace. Saturday it was American Graduate. Monday and Tuesday it was the Education Nation Conference. I also listened to the Clinton Global Initiative. Last night I watched part of Education Nation on WTTW and today followed a live chat about the film.

There were a number of profiles of youth serving organizations, but too little discussion of the leadership, marketing and resources needed to fill neighborhoods around poorly performing schools with mentor-rich learning programs. It led me to create this graphic.

I think our public education conversation is monopolized by the education/business establishment and that a focus on poverty and strategies that fill the non-school hours with youth and family supports, including jobs, is just not getting enough attention.

Do you agree? Can you think of a better caption for this graphic than what I've posted? Where are you meeting with people to build the leadership and support system needed to make high quality, constantly improving youth tutoring, mentoring, arts and technology programs available in your community?

This concept map visualizes the "pipeline to careers" support kids need.  Youth in affluent areas have most of these supports. Those in high poverty area have too few. 

How do you evaluate the programs that are in your community? Do the web sites have graphics that show an intent to help youth through school and into jobs and careers? Most programs can't do everything, but do they show what role they take in this effort?

Who will sponsor another track of on-line broadcasts where leaders are talking of what they are doing to support a city-wide network of youth serving organizations operating in non-school hours?

Become a middle-man in making change happen!

This graphic is from a new presentation created by Mina Song, and intern from IIT, who has been working with Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC in Chicago since mid May. This is the third of four presentations she's developing to help communicate the 4-part problem solving strategy that I've developed since 1993.

There is a mountain of research and articles available to help anyone build a PhD in understanding how concentrated poverty in big cities contributes to the high social and economic costs of poverty.

However, there are not enough places where people are reading parts of this research every week and discussing it, in the same way faith groups read scripture and discuss it each week. Nor are there enough leaders using maps and graphics to illustrate a need for resources to be distributed consistently in thousands of places for many years in order to overcome the weight of poverty and help more kids move through school and into "family sustaining" jobs and careers.

We need more people helping others find and use this information. Such people are facilitators. They are also important "middle men" and "intermediaries" who are needed to help make change and social problem solving a reality.



This concept map illustrates the many different supports all kids need as they grow up. Kids in poverty areas have fewer of these supports and in highly concentrated areas family and community have less ability to bring these supports to their neighborhoods by their own efforts and without help from others. Volunteers who become involved as mentors, tutors, coaches, etc. can become bridges, or social capital, that link the needs of the community to resources and ideas beyond the daily reach of community members and kids.



This map shows how a map can be created of a Congressional District to show the level of poverty and the availability of needed resources in all poverty areas of the district. The map can show assets in the district who should be working to help every child in the area move through school and into jobs BECAUSE they share the geography themselves! You can use the Tutor/Mentor Program Locator to build your own maps.

While blogs like this can share these ideas and concepts with a few people, the presentation done by Mina illustrates the need for many people to take on roles of collecting, communicating and helping people understand and use this information. With maps we can focus attention and resources to specific neighborhoods, and at all of the high poverty neighborhoods in a big city like Chicago.



The conference I host on June 14 is an invitation for people who are concerned with poverty to connect and network on a face-to-face basis. I've been hosting this conference since May 1994 but with little financial support or partnership from others who bear the high costs of poverty and social injustice in Chicago. Yet, more than 1000 organizations have participated. This blog shows some network analysis maps created to illustrate the range of organizations who have participated.

I hope you'll join in on the next conference and become a partner, sponsor and/or benefactor to help Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC continue to share these ideas and build this network.

The Future of Earth - Our Children. Is NATO talking about this?

My friend Phil Jackson of The Black Star Project sent his email newsletter this morning. It included a story I pointed to Friday, about Education Redlining in New York City. It also included a story titled "Half of UK's young Black males are unemployed."

With the big NATO meeting in Chicago today, and the G-8 meeting in Washington last week, I was prompted to create this graphic to suggest a type of platform that might connect those who are writing about bad news with those who are in the field leading organizations and schools that are trying to prepare youth to be the next generation of workers, along with CEOs and leaders, and those who are in decision-making seats right now and control the flow and distribution of resources needed to pay for what we do to shape our future.

I joined a discussion on Linked in last week where a question is How can we enable a Systems Thinking World? I'm in similar discussion on Facebook (here and here) and have enjoyed many such discussion in other groups.

If you narrow this down to "how do we support all kids from the time they are born to the time they are adults able to take care of themselves" which to me means they have a job so they can raise their own children without the challenges of highly segregated poverty and the knowledge of how to learn and work collectively with others as they move through their adult lives, then the first question I propose is "what do we know of the problem and what do we know of how others are already trying to solve this problem?"

This is the first part of a problem solving strategy that I've posted among a set of articles in the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC library.

If we can create on-line platforms that support the components of the pie chart above, or the steps in the strategy PDF I've posted, can we find the marketing power to draw growing numbers of people into this strategy, help them understand it and lead them to on-going actions that support youth mentoring, tutoring, learning, etc. in all of the places where high poverty is a challenge that most other kids don't face every day?

While I'm trying to find people to help me build a platform to support this work I realize that thousands of others are launching their own platforms for problem solving, social interaction, etc. every day. Thus we need to find ways to connect with each other, in many of the ways that are supported in this Change.MOOC.ca event which just concluded after over 30 weeks of shared learning.

One of the organizers, Stephen Downs, just sent out a compilation of his Essays on meaning and learning networks . It's over 600 pages so I doubt many will read this completely while they fly home from the NATO summit.

But what if they built this into an on-going learning course that was intended to teach more young people these ideas over a lifetime of learning?

Such connected learners could then use web sites with graphic organizers like this to choose what cause they want to learn about, and click into a set of connected web sites that would take them deeper and deeper into knowledge about the problem and knowledge about possible solutions and ways they could apply them in their own communities and through the collective work of many stakeholders.

If only one of the benefactors who paid for the NATO event, or who is paying for the attack advertising and political campaigns of this election year were to devote some funds to building these platforms and sustaining them for the next few election cycles, we might build a system where connected individuals work together to solve problems that governments have not figured out how to solve.

Avengers, Leadership, Teams & Introverts

If you're interested in creativity, leadership, teamwork and/or collaboration I encourage you to read Christopher Borrelli's review of the new "Avengers" movie in today's Chicago Tribune.

In one section he introduces readers to Susan Cain, the author of "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking," He wrote, Susan "told me, "In a group you can't truly explore your own mind, you can't fully examine your own ideas." She said: "I am not opposed to teamwork. I am opposed to how enamored of collaboration for its own sake our culture has become." And because teamwork is often strapped with a leader, "too often the most charismatic — or maybe with a superhero, the strongest — is viewed as the smartest and most creative."

I looked up Susan's web site and found this Manifesto on her web site.

This reminded me of an article I saw a while back titled 'Want To Be A Leader? ‘Learn To Be Alone With Your Thoughts’ in which says William Deresiewicz, "Speaking to a plebe class at West Point, said that without solitude, it’s hard to arrive at thoughts that are your own, and hard to develop the moral compass and moral courage necessary to act on those thoughts."

In another article, I read about how it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert in any field. This blog writes about the book "Outliers", by Malcolm Gladwell,which "puts forth the premise that to be an expert in your field requires a devotion to one’s craft for at least 10,000 hours."

I've spent more than 10,000 hours since 1975 leading a tutor/mentor program and much of that time has been spent in solitude, learning and reflection. That's where the ideas I share in the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC come from. I use graphics like this one to illustrate how creating programs and services that consistently help kids overcome poverty and rise through school and into jobs and careers is a process of learning and constant experimentation. It's one that requires constant investments of talent and time, which means a constant flow of dollars.

As I come across great thinking I point to it in articles like this, and archive links in the Tutor/Mentor Connection library so others can find and learn from the same ideas I'm learning from.

Most of what I'm thinking about relates to influencing the flow of resources to non-school tutor/mentor programs in high poverty neighborhoods. Most of these ideas can be adopted to the same problem in other social sectors. If we can influence the flow of resources and keep talent in programs longer, we increase the organizational knowledge and the ability of each organization to constantly improve their impact on kids and the volunteers who become part of these programs.

I'm sure others are spending their own time thinking about this and may have their own master plans and strategies. I hope we can connect on Facebook, Linked In, Twitter, the Tutor/Mentor Connection forum and/or the Conferences that I host in Chicago every six months.

Battle Plan for War on Poverty

I attended a STEM Education Summit in the Chicago area on Friday, hosted at Oak Park/River Forest High School. While the speakers at this Summit were not talking about the high school drop out crisis, which I've written about in past articles, they were talking about a workforce crisis that will result from baby-boomers retiring and not enough young people preparing to go into STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) related careers.

Over the past 18 years I've created a variety of graphics to illustrate this problem. The one below shows that the "pipeline to careers" is not working well enough to reach kids at an early age and provide a wide range of mentoring and learning supports that would result in a larger number finishing high school and post high school education and entering careers in STEM or any other avocation they choose.



In the conferences I go to and web sites I browse I don't see many who are using maps and charts and thinking about this problem the way generals and CEOs think about the distribution channels and logistics needed to win military wars, or business wars.

A few years ago I created a graphic that illustrates the planning that would need to take place to enable more and better mentor-rich programs to be in neighborhoods where kids don't have an effective entry point into the "pipeline to careers" nor to that have enough effective supports along the way. As a result, we're losing kids to street violence, bad health, poor nutrition, and lack of preparation for adult jobs and responsibilities.

I've been trying to think of a way to communicate this idea in an article that I could post on the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC web site or in the collection I've been building on Scribd.com.

If you look at this chart you'll see how I compare the planning process needed to support military forces in many places to that needed to make tutor/mentor programs available in many places. While many might want to create "pilots" or "demonstration projects" we can't really afford not to have some sort of learning support reaching K-12 kids in all of the high poverty areas of Chicago with intense forms of learning support and mentoring, while also providing needed supports to kids in all other neighborhoods who may need more inspiration and support to succeed in school and/or choose STEM careers.

Maps can help us focus our attention on specific parts of a problem. Out of all the people talking about education reform, perhaps some can focus just on high poverty neighborhoods, while others can focus on non-poverty areas. If we can segment our focus then we're talking about the same problems and able to converge on better solutions than if we have a mixed bag of discussion where the words are the same but the meanings are different, depending on what the economic and community support is for the kids you're talking about.

So, if we have a team focused on helping kids born in poverty be starting STEM careers in 20-25 years, the first step is to be building a library of information and ideas that the group can use to innovate new solutions that might generate more consistent support, and a better distribution of resources in more places.

To reach youth at every age level in more places with age-appropriate mentoring and learning a huge range of programs will be needed, meaning the planners need to be thinking of ways to recruit, train and equip thousands of program organizers, leaders, tutors, mentors, coaches, etc.

Imagine the logistics needed to put military forces all over the world and keep them supplied with food, weapons, ammunition, medicine, etc. The army of teachers, tutors, mentors and leaders needed to reach kids in every poverty neighborhood of the Chicago region requires the same type of on-going support.

The War in Iraq lasted over 8 years. World War II lasted 4 years. WalMart has been growing for more than 40 years! Imagine the thinking that is being done some place in the headquarters of the military and at companies like Wal Mart that enables them to constantly recruit and train new talent to take the place of those who retire, resign or are lost in combat. We need this same type of thinking preparing young people for STEM careers, and for careers leading programs that prepare young people for these careers!

We've spent billions of dollars fighting wars. Big business spends billions of dollars on their human resource development so they have well-trained people in the jobs that need to be filled in order for the companies to be successful. We need people who are innovating ways to generate revenue to support this massive infrastructure of youth development, mentoring and tutoring programs in just the same way.

It all comes down to how well you can build and sustain public attention, interest and support for the war effort. Companies spend millions of dollars on advertising and public relations to maintain support for their business strategies and to attract customers to their products and services. While there are events like National Mentoring Month, National Volunteer Week, Make A Difference Day, Black History Month, etc. where is the coordination and planning needed to turn these into an orchestra of events needed to build long-term public support for this battle plan to end poverty by help more kids through school and into 21st century jobs and careers?

I have been trying to map these ideas using the types of graphics I've used in this article, and using on-line platforms like this Debategraph tool.

I'm not sure how clearly I've communicated this idea. I invite others to do their own version of this story. However, while I may not be communicating as clearly as I'd like, I've spent more years thinking about this from a systems perspective than many others in this country. I've written more than 1000 articles on this blog alone, and created numerous illustrated essays posted on the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC site and in many other places.

If you're trying to develop a strategy to mentor kids to jobs and careers, I'd like to encourage you to read some of the articles I've written. I also encourage you to hire me to help you understand these ideas. I can come to you and talk about any of the articles on this blog, or that I've posted in the Tutor/Mentor Institute library or the Scribd.com library.

If you've been fortunate to amass great wealth and you want to leave a legacy, why not put your name on the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC or bring the Institute to alma mater where it can be integrated into the work a university does to prepare young people for adult roles.

If you'd like to connect, just post a comment or meet me on Twitter or Facebook.

Connecting DropOut Resources

I created the concept map below in October 2011 after attending the National Drop-Out Summit. I updated it today after attending another Drop-Out prevention event in Chicago last week.

Until the people organizing these events build some sort of internet portal that connects participants with each other so they can find ways to share ideas, strategies and work collectively toward solving this problem, we'll have too little action following powerful data that should motivate more of us to do more to solve this problem.

Fighting Dropout Crisis – Building Public Will

In the article I wrote Friday, title We All Pay a Price for the Dropout Crisis, I provided quotes from some of the leaders who spoke at events held in Chicago this week. The basic message was “High School Drop Outs Cost All of Us, not just the young people who face a “miserable life”.

(This map was created by Learning Point Associates. See this and other maps here.

I’ve attended dozens of events focused on poverty, public education and the dropout crisis. I’ve read all sorts of research on how to make youth programs and schools more effective.

They all have a point where they say “if we had the money” and if we had the “public will” to create policies and funding strategies to support better schools and better workforce-development activities.

But then they don’t go further to say “how do we achieve this?”

That’s what I focus on. I’d like to suggest two strategies in this article, which I’ve written about often in the past.

1)Using maps for accountability, resource distribution and to obtain the 51% of votes needed to enact new legislation. I suggest that leaders and voters could use maps to build understanding where this problem is most severe, build public support, and to hold elected leaders accountable for what they do. The map above shows locations of high drop-out schools in Illinois. They are mostly concentrated in urban areas but they are scattered throughout the state. The map below shows state legislative districts. The third map is from the Tutor/Mentor Program Locator and shows legislative districts in the Chicago area, with overlays showing poorly performing schools, poverty, and locations of existing non-school tutor/mentor programs.

Using maps like this, leaders could determine what districts have high drop out schools. These are districts where elected leaders (and businesses) should be held accountable for what they do to bring resources to the district to combat this problem. The Tutor/Mentor Program Locator map does not show all schools, or have a layer of data showing dropout schools. We could build this if we had the resources. However, such a map may be already available from another sources. If it is, let me know and we can point you to it.

If such a map does not yet exist, then it could be created through a service learning or graduate school project at a local high school or university. I outlined this map-building process in this PDF essay.

Once the map is available on the Internet we can determine how many votes are available from representatives with drop out schools in their districts. If it’s not 51% or more of needed votes, then the next step would be to look at surrounding districts where people and businesses are paying part of the costs of youth not finishing school. We could also look at districts with schools where a large number of youth are not finishing school, but which are not as bad as those in the “high” drop out category.

The goal is to identify enough representatives in the house and senate to get 51 to 60% of the votes needed to pass new legislation.


2) Expand the number of people who “care” enough to vote, volunteer and donate. This is equally important. At Wednesday’s dropout event, Andrea Zopp, President of the Chicago Urban League said “We’re tired. We don’t vote”. We need to get more people into the voting booth.

However, just getting more people in districts with high dropout schools to vote won’t assure 51% of the votes needed to change legislation, unless there are that many legislators representing districts with high drop out schools.

We need to find a way to build empathy and support in more affluent areas where they don’t have a lot of poorly performing schools. We can do that through an effort to increase the number of volunteers who connect with inner city youth in volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs.

We can do that if we focus on transforming the volunteer, not just the youth. In October 2009 I wrote an article titled Transforming Adults Involved In Volunteer-Based Tutor/Mentor Programs


This article was converted into this animation by an intern from the University of Michigan working with one of our one-year fellows from Northwestern University. Then it was converted into a video with the help of a volunteer from the United Kingdom.

The point of this article is that volunteers from many parts of the city and suburbs are connecting with inner city youth in non-school and school based tutor/mentor programs. If those volunteers are well supported and stay involved for multiple years some will build a personal bond with the kids, and an empathy for the problem, and will be willing to do more to help the kids move through school and into careers….if they are well-supported in their programs and encouraged in an on-going public education effort.

If we were to have 100 mentor-rich programs in the Chicago region with 50-100 volunteers each, that could be 5000 to 10,000 volunteers who actively advocate for public and private sector policies that help them in their own efforts to help kids to careers, and help schools and others do more of the work that needs to be done.

If in the other big cities throughout the state there were another 100 programs with 25-100 volunteers involved, that could double the number of potential advocates working to change the number of votes available to support new policies that reduce the dropout rate and help more kids through school and into careers out of poverty and contributing to the tax base and the democracy we cherish.

If we keep volunteers connected to kids and programs in years after they do direct service, the total number of potential voters would be even larger after 10 or 20 years. If we also are showing young people what it takes to help them move from poverty to jobs and careers, young people who graduate from these programs can also become voters and advocates.

This represents an army of not-yet-organized potential!

Take time to review these ideas. Share them with people in your own network. Support the infrastructure that leads to a growing number of volunteers connecting with kids in neighborhoods with high-dropout schools. Build map-based accountability and resource distribution strategies that assure that a full range of birth-to-work programs reach kids in neighborhoods with the highest dropout schools.

Instead of paying $200,000 a year to keep a youth in juvenile detention or paying $50,000 to keep an adult in jail, redirect this money to an education and enrichment system that moves more of these young people to jobs and careers.

It can be done.

We all pay price for high school dropouts

In this article I’m providing quotes from some of the speakers at two events I attended this week in Chicago. On Wednesday the event was “Re-Enrolling Out of School youth: A state, County and City Action Blueprint". On Tuesday the event was “Connecting Communities for the Common Good” and was advertised as “Conversations and Partnership Opportunities with the Obama Administration’s Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships Office.”

I ran into some of the same people at both events. Many I've known for more than a decade.

This weekend I’ll post an article showing how maps can be used to build partnership and accountability and possibly to get the 51% of votes needed to affect legislation in the Illinois House and Senate. I’ll also show how volunteer-involvement in tutor/mentor programs can provide the extra adult support youth are calling for and can also build the extra political advocacy needed to gain needed legislative support.

But in this article I want to share some quotes and hopefully get more people thinking about this pipeline to jobs and careers. It's clogged.

Wednesday’s event drew much more media attention than Tuesday’s White House Partnership event, even though the Mayor was a speaker.

The editorial pages of the Chicago SunTimes and Chicago Tribune both had articles showing the high costs to society of young people dropping out of high school.

In the December 8 Chicago SunTimes, Alejandro Escalona wrote “I’ve covered Chicago as a reporter for almost 20 years and every now and then, a new study6 comes along that presents the dropout rate among minority students as an emergency situation with catastrophic consequences for minority communities.” Then he writes “So I find it refreshing that the latest report looks at the drain on city and state resources. Reducing the dropout rate would lower the costs of some enormously expensive social problems and, quite simply, be good for city and state finances.”

A star-studded cast of education and political leaders addressed the crowd on Wednesday at the Union League Club in Chicago. Here are some quotes:

Jesse Ruiz, Chair, Ill. State Council on Re-Enrolling Students Who Have Dropped Out.
“We know what we need to do. We just need a collective effort to do it.”

Andrea Zopp, President & CEO Chicago Urban League
“It’s not just the right thing to do. There is 20% difference in people going to jail between high school grads and youth who dropout. The cost per year to keep someone in prison is nearly $50,000 per person.”

Toni Preckwinkle, Cook County Board President
“The failure of our public school system feeds our prisons.” “The US has 5% of the world’s people and 25% of the world’s prison population. We’re doing something terribly wrong.”

Andrew Sum, Professor of Economics, Center for Labor Market Studies, Northeastern Illinois University …author of the research discussed on Tuesday and in media editorials.
“Everything has gotten worse over past 25 years.” “You can no longer make it in Illinois without a high school diploma.” “We can’t have a strong democracy if we tolerate this problem”.

Gery Chico, Chair, Illinois State Board of Education
“Kids tell us what the problem is. First is ‘No adults in my life to motivate me.’ “

Jean-Claude Brizard, Chicago Public Schools CEO, and a Panel of political leaders also spoke but I did not get quotes from them.

While the "Re-Enrolling Dropouts" event was Wednesday, on Tuesday an event at the UIC Forum attracted nearly 1000 guests, with Chicago's Mayor Rahm Emanuel kicking off the event. It's goal was to show faith based and community organizations ways they can build partnership with the Federal Government.

Some quotes from Chicago’s Mayor Rahm Emanuel
“Too many families are falling through the cracks….. Government cannot do it alone."

Marie Johns, Deputy Administrator, Small Business Administration was the noon keynote speaker. She said “We’re all given gifts and are responsible to use those gifts to build a better community.”

As Alejandro Escalona wrote in the SunTimes, this is not new news. Even talking about the costs to society is not new news. Unless we find a way to build public willpower to build and sustain comprehensive, mentor-rich school-to-work programs in all neighborhoods with high drop out rates this story will repeat over and over in the coming years.

View the tags at the left to see the hundreds of articles I’ve written about these problems since 2005. Here are a couple:

On October 23, 2007 I wrote a summary of a Chicago Public Schools meeting led by Arne Duncan back in 2006 where he called for High Schools of Excellence…Consequences of Dropping Out of School in Illinois

In September 2005 I wrote a summary of an Illinois High School Summit hosted by the Illinois College Access Network and Chicago Public Schools. The discussion at the Summit was framed by the question, “What is the future vision and what must be achieved systematically for high schools to be successful in the 21st century?” During this Summit one man brought up issue of political will.

He said “Are the right people involved to make significant change? Are the people driving the process the ones in charge of crafting the solutions?

This question was not answered in 2005 and it's not yet been answered in 2011. I've been focusing on this problem for 20 years and I've shared my ideas with Gery Chico, Jesse Ruiz, the Alternative Schools Network, and the past CEOs of Chicago Public Schools and the Mayors of Chicago. They've been available on the internet since 1998.

Yet, I'm still just a whisper in the wilderness. Too few are taking the time to understand how maps and mentoring can be used to expand support for inner city youth and kids attending high school dropout factories.

Visit this blog over the coming weekend and see what I suggest is a strategy for building the public and political will needed to bring more resources into areas with high dropout schools so we can get the pipeline working for more kids.

Chronic Truancy Jumps in area schools

Today's Chicago Tribune has a feature showing that truancy is rising in Chicago area schools, which contributes to poor performance, high drop out rates, and a high cost to society and to the young people involved.

One school shown with 56.9% of students chronically truant was Robeson High School, located at South Normal Boulevard on the South Side. I used the http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifChicago Program Locator's Interactive map to zoom into this neighborhood and created this map.



This map shows that there are three organizations trying to reverse this trend in the area around Robeson. One is the Yancy Boys & Girls Club which has developed a partnership with Big Brothers Big Sisters of Metropolitan Chicago. A second is the By the Hand Club for Kids, who on their web site show some impressive statistics.

I did a second map showing the area of Belmont-Cragin Elementary School, located in the Central part of Chicago. This map required a little more effort to make because this school was not included on the 2007 or 2008 list of low performing public schools, thus it's not included in the map on the Program Locator. Since the Tutor/Mentor Connection has had no public or private funding to support this mapping project since a $50,000 gift from an anonymous donor in late 2007 we've not been able to keep updating the mapping and now we have no staff at all to support this resource.



Thus I placed an X on the map to show where Belmont-Cragin is located. You can see that while there is a medium rate of poverty in the area (based on 2000 census info) there are no tutor/mentor programs in the area around the school. If you use the Asset Map feature on the Program locator you could determine if any churches, hospitals, banks or colleges are in the area, who could be helping start such programs.

I have been collecting information about tutor/mentor programs and using maps to show where they are needed and where existing programs are operating since 1993. My goal is to help existing programs connect and learn from each other while creating public attention that would draw more donors and volunteers to support the existing programs or to help new ones form where they are needed.

I have hosted a Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conference every year since 1994 to encourage programs to network and share ideas. Obviously the Boys & Girls Clubs, Big Brothers Big Sisters and By the Hand Club have some expertise they could share with others....if they were to make time to participate in the conferences.

There are many organizations in Chicago who have much to share, and much to learn. We all need more resources to support the work we do and constantly improve based on what we learn from our own efforts and the efforts of peers. Yet if we can't find time to connect and share ideas and work together to build the pool of resources available to do this work, it's unlikely that we'll ever have more than a few good tutor/mentor programs working to help more youth succeed in school and in life.

There's still time to register for Friday's conference. The web site is www.tutormentorconference.org

Building Community. Focusing on Drop Out Crisis

I attended the National Dropout Prevention Conference this week along with about 700 other people from around the country. I was a workshop presenter at 8am Monday morning and spent the rest of the time networking with a wide range of people. I want to thank Ed Bates of the Lake County Regional Office of Education for encouraging me to participate. Ed was a co-chair of the conference organizing committee.

I created this concept map to introduce you to the people and organizations I met through workshops, sitting at lunch together and attending a dinner event on Monday. Over the next couple of weeks I'll post some quotes from some of the presentations and I'll reach out to the people I met and invite them to share their workshop presentations so you can learn more about what they talked about.

In this map I also pointed to other information I'd already aggregated about the Drop-out Crisis which is posted in the Tutor/Mentor Library. The real challenge is not finding more ideas, but finding ways to draw more people together to understand and apply these ideas in more places.

A couple of weeks ago I was part of an "Improving the Education System" panel hosted by Becoming We the People and held at The First Unitarian Church in Hyde Park. While the attendance was around a dozen people this was recorded and posted on YouTube so it is available to many more people than the number at this week's conference.

In three week's (Friday, November 4) I'll host the next Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conference and the goal will be the same as these other events. We need to find ways to surround youth in poverty areas where the dropout rate is the highest with mentors, tutors and extra learning and enrichment opportunities so we help build aspirations and prepare more youth to come to school every day better prepared to learn.

If you're concerned with the dropout crisis and see mentoring as part of the solution I encourage you to help me build attendance for the Nov. 4 conference. One of the panel discussions will be recorded by Becoming We the People and available on YouTube in the weeks following the conference.

Building Future Impact

At the end of January "more than 17 U.S. corporations made commitments to expand or create mentoring programs that increase graduation rates among America's youth and position them for success".

We want to help them keep this commitment. Please read more.

In past articles we've used this graphic to illustrate the infrastructure needed at places like Cabrini Connections to attract youth and volunteers and support them so they stay connected for many years.

We use maps and graphics like this to illustrate that Chicago needs high quality tutor/mentor programs in every poverty neighborhood and that every non profit tutor/mentor program has the same need for visibility, volunteers, operating dollars, technology, ideas, highly motivated staff, etc. This article illustrates how we create animated graphics to help people understand and respond to this message.

When I talk to volunteers and leaders of Cabrini Connections I find myself constantly scratching out the same concept over and over. So I've created the chart below.

This chart illustrates that a company's impact can grow if they begin to plan further in advance, and if they apply the same process improvement tools that they use to grow their business. This chart shows a 12 month cycle of events that supports what happens at schools and non-school tutor/mentor programs. For instance, in May and June school is ending. This is when we should be celebrating what happened in tutor/mentor programs, while also sharing ideas that can be used to make each tutor/mentor program better when school starts in the fall.




In August, when school starts and every tutor/mentor program is looking for volunteers, corporate communications and advertising could be encouraging volunteers to get involved in many locations, if they were pointing to program locator databases like the T/MC maintains. In September and October company workplace fund raising campaigns could be encouraging other employees to make donations to support the infrastructure at places were some employees are tutors/mentors.

In November there's an opportunity for programs to come together and share ideas, and celebrate the volunteers and kids who have joined tutor/mentor programs in the fall. This publicity can help recruit more volunteers to be tutors/mentors, and some volunteers to be tech support, communicators, accountants, etc. It can also motivate more donors to make year-end donations during the holiday season to support tutor/mentor programs.

By next January, there could be a wealth of actions that have taken place in the previous 12 months, that could be celebrated, shared, and used to stimulate involvement of more businesses and more volunteers during the next 12-month cycle.

This planning cycle is describe in this pdf essay. It does not change from year to year. What we hope changes is the number of businesses who take on leadership roles, and the number of volunteers and operating dollars that begin to flow to ALL of the volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs operating in Chicago and other cities.

This graphic shows that what happens in the month following the Mentoring Summit and the corporate announcement is small compared to what could happen in three, six, nine and 12 months or in two to five years if corporate leaders recruit and empower marketing teams to grow the company's involvement and to plan ahead so they maximize and grow their own impact from year to year.

This animated presentation shows this quarterly event cycle.

If people who read this article pass it on to corporate managers and CEOs some will see this as a business strategy that they can apply which will engage more of their employees and customers and have a greater impact on reducing the drop out rate while also improving employee skills, informal networks and loyalty to the companies that supports this process.

If you'd like to have me come and talk to your company about these ideas we'd be more than willing to help.

College Completion - The Other Drop Out Crisis

While it's alarming that many inner city kids don't finish high school, it's equally disturbing that a large percent that enter college don't graduate. This web site provides state by state data, and many more resources on the college graduation challenge.

57 million watch NFL game. How Many Spend time Thinking about Consequences of Dropping Out of School?

Yesterday I attended a public forum hosted by The Chicago Urban League, The Illinois State Council on Re-Enrolling Students who Dropped Out of School, the Alternative Schools Network and the Latino Policy Forum.

The highlight of the meeting was testimony by youth who attend alternative schools in Chicago who talked about how important it is for teens to have jobs, as stepping stones to college and careers, to help pay the bills for their own families, and to keep from being involved in negative activities.

More than 20 elected officials attended, along with myself and over 100 other interested organizations.

Jack Wuest does a great job of organizing events like this, and the Alternative Schools Network has all of the publications and media links on their web site.

There were feature stories in Time Magazine, the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago SunTimes, but how many people are spending as much time reading and reflecting on these stories, as they spent last weekend watching National Football League games?

Jack said "this is important to our Democracy". Is NFL Football as important?

Even if we had millions of people reading the articles on Drop Out Crisis from this week's media, and from the efforts of groups like America's Promise, how do we keep the attention focused on these issues every day, so more people understand the problems, then act in some way to help kids from many locations come through school and into jobs and careers?

One suggestion would be to enlist students as researchers, communicators and leaders in this process. The testimony of students at yesterday's meeting was great. One student did a "rap" that received a standing ovation. However, these were just drawing attention to the problem. They did not draw volunteers, resources and jobs to places on the map of Chicago where youth need jobs, and where youth need business mentors to help them find paths to jobs.

At the right is a graphic created this week by one of the interns working at Cabrini Connections. It shows a map of Chicago, and how one person can recruit his/her friends, employees, faith community, and point them to information such as hosted on the Alternative Schools Web site, or the Tutor/Mentor Connection web site, and point them to programs all over the city where volunteers and donors can help.



In the Video section of the Cabrini Connections web site you can see other ways students can be involved in creating, and distributing the "get informed, get involved" messages on a daily basis, which are needed to build an audience of fans who will take a personal, and passionate, interest in helping youth in America become the leaders of America's future.

Youth as leaders, starts with youth as learners and researchers, then grows to youth as communicators, and youth as mobilizers. These graphics and videos illustrate how youth can use the new social media of the Internet, to mobilize forces for change, and to help them in their own pathways to careers.

New Reasons to Support Tutor/Mentor Programs

Today the Chicago Tribune featured a story about a program in Baltimore that is working with high risk youth. This is the program Chicago Public Schools is bringing to Chicago.

This week Time Magazine featured an article about the decline of jobs for teens in America.

These represent two parts of the same problem, but are they connected in the media, or in public policy? Youth without jobs living in high poverty areas represent a breeding ground for negative behavior and illegal commerce. Youth without mentors, extra learning, or role models to show paths through school and into careers, are more vulnerable to be recruited by the negative forces in their lives.

What are leaders doing to help all youth move through school to jobs and careers? Do you see any of these ideas from the people who want to be elected to be Governor, Senator, local representatives in Illinois?



Our maps show that there are already too few volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs, and they are poorly distributed around the city. Unless volunteers and donors step forward in January and this spring, some of the existing programs may run out of the money needed to continue. Unless other leaders step forward, we'll never increase the number of good programs. Unless businesses connect these programs to their workforce development strategies, we won't have jobs/vocational training to help kids stay in school and move to legitimate careers.

Who is writing about this? Who is advocating for this?

In other cities and states there are "mentoring partnerships" which are funded by state, government, business and foundation donations. According to the National Mentoring Partnership, these operate with budgets ranging from $300,000 to $1 million per year.

The Tutor/Mentor Connection operates with less than $225,000 in the third largest city in the country. Yet we do much with our money to draw volunteers and donors to individual programs, and to help programs grow in areas where none now exist.

If we want to address the issues of poverty, gangs, violence, poor schools, future workforce, we need leaders who will support the growth of individual tutor/mentor programs throughout the region, and we need leaders who will provide funding to the Tutor/Mentor Connection at a level that is near what other partnerships receive.

If you can help, use the resources on the T/MC site to connect directly with individual programs, or call the T/MC at 312-492-9614.

Poverty, Poorly Performing Schools, High Drop Out Rates

This map is one that the Tutor/Mentor Connection has created to show where poverty is most concentrated in the Chicago area, and how this contributes to poorly performing schools (see more).

I encourage you to visit this PDF to see maps showing the distribution of high school drop outs in Illinois. These maps were created by the Midwest Education Laboratory of Learning Point Associates, and were distributed at the High School Drop Out Summit held on Nov. 4th, in Bloomington.

The maps show where the problem is most severe. Volunteer-based Tutor/Mentor Programs are one strategy that can enlist more people who don't live in poverty, and may not have kids in school, but who need to be involved in making schools in low income areas more effective at helping kids move to college and 21st century careers.

If you want to enlist your church, business, college, fraternity of civic/social group in making more volunteer-based tutoring and/or mentoring programs available in urban areas, then come to the Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conference next week at Northwestern University in Evanston.

If you can't come to the conference, connect with the T/MC on Ning, or Facebook, or visit our web site and begin to use the material to support your own understanding and involvement.

We're giving scholarships to more than 40 people at next week's conference. Can you make a donation to help offset that expense?