Foundation President Calls for Community to Support High School

February 4, 2005

By Beverly A. Carroll Staff Writer

The president of Carnegie Corp. of New York came to Chattanooga on Thursday to celebrate reform — funded by Carnegie — in Hamilton County’s 17 high schools. 

 But Vartan Gregorian also came to issue a call to the community for ongoing support of the programs when Carnegie grant funding ends in another year. 
 
'We chose Hamilton County because of the possibilities and the difficulties it faced,' Dr. Gregorian said before a visit to Red Bank High School’s health sciences academy. 'Our goal is to galvanize the business community, the unions, educators, parents and community leaders. The decline of public education has taken decades. The (rebuilding) will take time.'

Hamilton County is one of seven school systems across the country selected by Carnegie Corp. to share in a $60 million grant for high school reform.

Dan Challener, president of the Public Education Foundation, which contributed a $6 million matching grant, said the county has data that show what schools have accomplished.    'Right from the start we said we would measure rates of ninth-graders passing to the 10th grade, the number of students taking the ACT and student performance on Gateways (state tests required for high school graduation),' Mr. Challener said. 'There’s been growth in every area.'

Dr. Gregorian, who spoke six languages (English was not one of them) when he arrived in America at age 21, told Rotary Club of Chattanooga members that in the past, high school graduation was not as important.

'In the 19th century it was all right for 50 percent (of students) to not graduate from high school,' he said. 'We had a blue-collar work force. But not now. The knowledge society needs people who are knowledgeable.'

Carnegie officials acknowledged the difficulty of building local support for reform. Elected officials, the business community and public need to view education funding as an investment, not simply an expenditure, they said.

'The expense of starting a program is greater than the expense of continuing,' said Connie Warren, Carnegie senior program officer and urban high school initiatives director. 'It’s the responsibility of a community to invest not only in its students but in its future. It’s a broader public investment.'

Dr. Gregorian, who started his career as a teacher, said Carnegie would like to see the seven districts awarded grants serve as role models for reform efforts across the nation.

'If this fails, I’m afraid people will walk away from public education,' he said. 'We will have two strata: the educated and the uneducated. We are at the point of saying public (schools) are doomed to be ugly, do not count. We must say that all excellence cannot belong only to the private sector.'

Dr. Gregorian toured a science lab at Red Bank High School, where he listened to students listing their goals to be doctors, researchers, nurses, pharmacists and professors.    'You have motivated them all to aim high,' he told the students’ teachers.

Teachers in the school’s health science academies said the grant money allowed them to create a program that prepares students for college or the work world. Students are prepared to take the state’s certified nursing assistant licensing test after graduation, for example, they said.    

E-mail Beverly A. Carroll at bcarroll@timesfreepress.com