The Challenge

All children deserve the opportunity to succeed. But it’s harder than ever to find a path out of poverty without a college education or technical training. 

• Low-income students are six times more likely to drop out of high school and fewer than one third of them will enroll in college 
• A 6th grade student who misses more than 20% of class, whose teacher reports poor behavior, or who fails math or English is 70% more likely to drop out
• The current high school dropout rate is a primary contributor to stagnating U.S. economic mobility and results in over $300 billion in lost wages, taxable income, and health care, welfare and incarceration costs
• While states and the nation are trying to produce workers with skills to master new technologies and adapt to complexities of a global economy, school budgets have become tighter than ever
• Summer learning loss is a primary cause of the persistent academic achievement gap.

Without programs like Horizons, low-income students experience a substantial and cumulative erosion of reading and math skills that can ultimately leave them years behind their peers.

What is summer learning loss? Watch this video:

“I believe that our experience demonstrates … that schools alone, conceived in our current early-20th-century model, are too weak an intervention, if our goal is to get all students to high levels of achievement. … What's needed is a new model of child development and education—a learning system that makes sense for the 21st century.”  

Paul Reville, former Massachusetts Secretary of Education, professor, Harvard Graduate School of Education