Since September 2005 WICHE has administered a highly successful national project that has made a genuine difference in the lives of thousands of high schoolers: the State Scholars Initiative (SSI), a federally funded program that motivates students to take a rigorous course of study in high school to ready them for college or work and engages businesses in this endeavor. On September 30 SSI’s national office at WICHE closed its doors (though state programs continue).

 
This is a good time to recount some of the successes logged by SSI – a $6.6 million initiative funded by the U.S. Department of Education through the Office of Vocational and Adult Education (OVAE) under the Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Technical Education Act of 1998.
 
Almost half of all states participated in the program, and 18 remain active: Arizona, Arkansas, Connecticut, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming (six others – Michigan, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, Rhode Island, and Washington – have completed their programs). So far, about 950 school districts have participated in the program, which uses businesspeople to motivate students to take a high school curriculum patterned after the National Commission on Excellence in Education recommendations (four years of English; three years of math; three years of basic lab science; 3.5 years of social studies; and two years of the same language other than English). Over the last four years, business volunteers from over 600 companies have visited 8th grade classrooms and talked to students about how taking a rigorous curriculum in high school will help them in college and their careers. To reinforce its message, SSI collected data on nearly 1.5 million student enrollments, which show that the program has in fact influenced students to take and complete rigorous classes.
 
But SSI did more. To spread the word about the value of a rigorous curriculum – and the benefit of education and business working together – SSI hosted the National Summit on Academic Rigor and Relevance in Boston in April 2008, attended by some 300 participants from 36 states and territories, with presentations from such experts as Leon Lederman, Nobel Prize winner in physics, Roy Romer, former Colorado governor and retired superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, and Charles Kolb, president of the Committee for Economic Development  (read the summit proceedings.
 
WICHE would like to thank all of those who made SSI a vital and growing program. But we’re particularly grateful to three individuals: SSI’s director, Terese Rainwater, whose skill at managing the program was a key factor in its remarkable success; its associate project director, Michelle Médal, whose smart, detail-oriented organizational talents ensured that this complex, multistate endeavor ran smoothly; and the initiative’s hard-working project director at OVAE, Nancy Brooks, whose guidance and expertise helped us to make SSI as strong and widespread a program as possible. WICHE is proud to have worked with them and had a hand in growing this valuable program.

 

November 2009  | Share this on Twitter | Post this on Facebook