According to Fight Crime: Invest in Kids, high school dropouts are three and one-half times more likely than high school graduates to be arrested, and more than eight times as likely to be incarcerated. Throughout the country, 68 percent of state prison inmates have not received a high school diploma. According to researchers, 10 percentage-point increases in graduation rates have historically been shown to reduce murder and assault rates by approximately 20 percent. Increasing graduation rates by 10 percentage points would prevent each year 25 murders and 1,700 aggravated assaults in Kansas, and more than 70 murders and 4,400 aggravated assaults in Missouri.

We have choices to make concerning what we want for our community and the reality is this: the choices we are making as a community are perfectly organized and structured to create the community we have now. Or said differently, we have exactly what we want. If this were not so, we would be making new choices.

We'd be choosing high quality, universal PreK programs (the KCMSD is doing this but currently the State provides no funding for it), we'd be choosing comprehensive birth-to-school models (similar to the Harlem Children's Zone), we'd be doing everything in our power to increase teach quality (as suggested by the New Teacher Project), we'd be choosing to personally engage in the lives of our scholars (like with BE 1!), we'd be choosing to walk away from the socio-economic self-segregation that has come to typify America's urban/suburban dyad. As a community, the choice for our scholars is in our hands: school or the streets. We choose.

Links to experts/research: EdTrust -- Teacher Quality, Center for Public Education -- PreK, Harlem Children's Zone, Fight Crime: Invest in Kids -- Early Education, The New Teacher Project -- Missed Opportunities, BE 1! -- Choose to BE 1!