Money alone cannot help our schools

While money is certainly a crucial component for improving the quality of education, simply throwing it at the schools will not solve our educational problems. Even with more money in the system and more computers in the classrooms, students do not seem to care about school and our schools cannot seem to engage their students. The real question for our educational system is, how do we get students interested and keep them in school so that they can graduate and become productive members of our society? The answer: Make the curriculum relevant. BUILD, a local educational nonprofit, has designed its curriculum to be relevant to students' lives, and the results speak for themselves.

BUILD, founded in East Palo Alto in 1999, runs the country's largest youth business incubator and dedicates itself to teaching underserved high school students the skills of entrepreneurship. Additionally, BUILD is a member of a national coalition of social entrepreneurs called America Forward that has formed an alliance to help promote results-driven programs to deal with pressing social issues such as educational reform. America Forward (www.americaforward.org) urges candidates on both sides of the aisle to embrace this bold, results-driven approach to solving our nation's problems.

Unlike other educational reforms that have promised much and delivered little, BUILD has consistently achieved astonishing results. To date, 100 percent of BUILD's students have graduated from high school and gone on to college. How has BUILD been able to achieve this kind of success, where other programs have failed? The value of a program like BUILD does not just lie in graduation rates. The value lies in engaging students and helping prepare them for the future.

We need to invest in our education system, without question. We must demand with our votes, however, that policymakers use this money to solve systemic problems such as dropout rates rather than continuing to fund a broken system. If state and local officials cannot come up with effective solutions, let the money go to organizations like BUILD. This type of social entrepreneurship is clearly succeeding where our government has failed.

Suzanne McKechnie Klahr is the CEO and founder of BUILD, an entrepreneurship-based college-access program with offices in East Palo Alto and Washington, D.C.