Ready by 21 Spotlighted at the Aspen Ideas Festival

For the second year, Karen Pittman, co-founder of the Forum for Youth Investment, was an invited participant and speaker at the annual Aspen Ideas Festival held July 2-5. She presented the Ready by 21 Approach and Challenge during two sessions In the Festival’s Innovations in Education track.  

"Mentoring Kids for College and Careers: What is Working?," was a lively discussion of strategies for increasing post-secondary readiness and  success of disadvantaged and disconnected students. Along with Karen, panel participants included Peter Edelman, co-director of the Joint Degree in Law and Public Policy program; faculty director of the Center on Poverty, Inequality, and Public Policy; and professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center, Hilary Pennington, director of U.S. Special Initiatives at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Larry Rosenstock , CEO and founding principal of High Tech High Learning, and Gary Higgins, director of the Aspen Institute's Commission on No Child Left Behind Act. Karen used research studies to underscore the importance of providing youth with high expectations and non-academic supports in high school and beyond. Also, her presentation emphasized the futility of continuing to develop one-off support programs for youth without having good data on who they are, how and what they are doing (academically, socially, physically, vocationally) and what they need in terms of family and system supports.

Next, the Ready by 21 Challenge and Approach were front and center in the session, "What We Need to Do to Change the Odds for Our Nation's Youth" jointly presented by the Forum and Gallup, one of the Ready by 21 Partners.  Shane Lopez, Ph.D., senior scientist- in-residence  and Justin Bibb, associate partner-director of Community Strategies presented results from the Gallup Student Poll which measures the hope, engagement and well-being of students in grades 5-12 through a new, groundbreaking survey administered anonymously in America’s schools. The top-note finding – that only one in four students is hopeful, engaged and thriving, set the stage for questions about the relationship between overall well-being and academic success. and the importance of improving environments and opportunities, not just curricula.

Interest in Ready by 21 was high among those attending the two sessions. The Festival's Who's Who list of participants included Michael Eisner, founder of The Tornante Company and retired chairman and CEO of the Walt Disney Company, Margaret Spellings, senior advisor at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and former U.S. secretary of education, Anna Deavere Smith, actor, playwright, teacher, and author, Roger W. Ferguson, Jr., president and CEO of TIAA-CREF, Eric Schmidt, chairman and CEO of Google, and Walter Isaacson, president and CEO of the Aspen Institute.

Co-organizer of the Aspen Ideas Festival was The Atlantic. One of the Festival 's long standing corporate cosponsors was the Altria Corporation[BS6] which made a donation to the Ready by 21 Partnership and sponsored a Ready by 21 ad in the July/August 2009 issue of The Atlantic. The two-page ad (see the attachment below) provides the philosophy behind Ready by 21 and the Partnership.