DON’T FORGET ED! College Board launches campaign to put education on national political agenda

Tick tock. Did you realize that every hour of the school day, 857 U.S. students drop out? If not, the College Board is looking to educate you about this growing crisis in American education. To dramatize their point, they staged a massive ‘show and tell’ by arranging 857 empty desks on the National Mall in Washington, DC recently. Their mission: to get education reform on the national political agenda.

The desks are just part of a new campaign, DON’T FORGET ED! According to a recent report,it is slated to include a full page ad in the New York Times, public service announcements, a website, social media and direct mail. The initiative marks a landmark for the College Board, an association that represents over 6000 educational organizations, but has always steered clear of political waters. However, don’t expect the testing-behemoth to endorse any candidates; this is strictly a campaign to inform and rally the American public.

Education has not been a big issue in a presidential contest since 2000, in the Bush/Gore dust-up. And while both President Obama and former Governor Romney have addressed the issue, it is not expected to be a game changer in the 2012 election. Both candidates face deep divides in their own parties on education policy, and ultimately the federal government exercises limited control over public schools. This authority lies with the states and local groups like schoolboards.

However, the folks at Policy Mic, a bipartisan online platform for Millennials, have picked up on the DON’T FORGET ED! campaign, and released their laundry list of issues they feel should be on the agenda during the 2012 elections:

• Higher costs have made public higher education less accessible. The recession hit colleges and universities hard -- 36 states reported budget reductions from legislatively-allocated taxpayer appropriations. The result: higher tuition, shrinking scholarships and more student loans. The American Association of State Colleges and Universitiesnotes that 2011 marked “an irreversible slide of U.S public higher education being a collectively-funded public good to that of an individually purchased private good.”
• Cyberbullying needs to be addressed. One third of the U.S. youth population is affected by bullying, and tragedies like the suicide of Tyler Clementi point out thatschools and colleges need to step up to the challenge of dealing with cyberbullying. Defining parameters has proved tricky, The White House launched an annual BullyingPrevention conference in 2010, however establishing the parameters for state governments and individual educational institutions has proved tricky. In the age of technology, cyberbullying and its prevention needs to be on the national agenda.

• College graduation rates need to increase for the U.S. to remain competitive. By 2018, 101 million jobs will require a college education or training, and if the U.S. college graduation rates stay the same, we will be 3 million graduates short. This could be devastating to our economy.
• Students lack crucial skills. The facts: 74% of 12th graders lack proficiency in math, and 62% lack proficiency in reading.
• Students face unequal opportunities. Equal opportunity does not exist in public education: there is still racial bias, discrimination regarding disabled students, female students are underrepresented in STEM fields like physics; and over two million high schoolers lack the option to learn calculus.

Back on the Mall, college students circulated among the visitors, gathering signatures of DON”T FORGET ED! petitions. When asked what made her make the trip from New York to Washington to stand in the hot sun with a clipboard, one young woman cited the fact that thesteep sticker price keeps too many people from pursuing a college education.

“This is supposed to be the land of opportunity,” she said.