Blog

It is heartening to see the 2008 presidential candidates articulating substantive policy proposals to improve the American educational system. As America Forward illustrated in its recent blog post “How to Improve Education? Take Innovation Seriously?”, not all of the candidates’ thoughts on how to reform our education system deserve high praise. However, through forums such as this and others throughout the nation, we are optimistic that this is the beginning of a robust debate regarding how to stem dropout rates, improve student achievement, and provide more opportunities for young people to grow into America’s leaders.

I spent last week in New Orleans. I’ve been traveling a lot of late—visiting cities where Sports4Kids operates and possible cities for expansion. Because Sports4Kids targets schools serving low-income kids, I’ve spent a lot of time in low-income urban neighborhoods, visiting the poorest and most under-resourced schools. I’ve blogged about it before—it can be heartbreaking to see the myriad ways we send low-income children the very real message that we don’t value them. But I am almost always equally blown away by the omnipresent moments of grace—people going way beyond what could ever be expected of them to make sure the kids feel both valued and loved.

America Forward is not only a direction, it is a revolution in the making.

Since the Depression we’ve experimented with two great, and radically different, governing philosophies. FDR launched an era in which the federal government aspired to be the center of action and activity to solve almost all our problems. And Ronald Reagan launched a revolution to the opposite extreme, arguing that government was in fact the problem, not the solution.

With the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation taking the lead, several national foundations are working together to create greater impact with their funding. The New York Times today highlights their goal of helping successful nonprofits become virtually self-sustaining through the greater efficiency that size and scale can bring. The effort by McConnell Clark and its partners “is groundbreaking,” an acknowledgment “by major funders that scale isn’t cheap and that the order of magnitude needed to scale up to make real and lasting changes will take collaboration,” said Kirsten Moy, director of the economic opportunities program at the Aspen Institute. This is an important step forward in establishing the potential of what staged capital can do to grow social innovation, and we look forward to learning from this and other emerging experiments.

If greater investment in social entrepreneurship is going to be a key strategy in moving America Forward, then we need a plan to develop our nation’s pipeline of social innovators.

After months of promoting the Music National Service initiative (MNSi) as an effective strategy to meet critical needs in education, health and public safety, I realized last week that music and the arts might have profound role to play in feeding this pipeline.

In the struggle to improve schools in the poorest neighborhoods, experts say no problem is more challenging than the high school dropout rate. To tackle that problem, some educators focus on raising test scores. Others focus on the bricks-and-mortar of the school, repairing leaky roofs, and buying new computers. But every day young people continue to drop out of school for issues unrelated to how smart they are, how hard they work or how new their computers are. They drop out because they are bored. They drop out because they have an undiagnosed learning disability. They drop out because they need a job to help support their families. They don’t have clothes that fit, basic healthcare, enough good food to eat, or a stable home. And no one knows their name or really seems to care. So why bother staying in school when so many other forces are working against you?

We should not be surprised that candidates like Senators Dodd, Clinton and Obama are talking about national service. National Service is the rare idea whose time has come in the truest sense of the word. The future is now—and we should embrace it.

Presidential candidate Chris Dodd beat TIME Magazine to the punch when he proposed the first comprehensive national service proposal of the campaign back in June. Dodd’s proposal, which features cabinet level status for the Corporation for National and Community Service, mandates school-based service as a graduation requirement, increases AmeriCorps to one million members, and creates a Rapid Response Reserve Corps of national service alumni, a Summer of Service for middle schoolers, and a national education corps, among other things.