On Tuesday, I had the chance to join business leaders, elected officials and civic leaders on the Peninsula for one of the Virginia Chamber of Commerce’s regional briefings on Blueprint Virginia—Preparing for a Brighter Future. Blueprint Virginia is a comprehensive effort to provide business leadership, direction and long-range economic development planning for Virginia. It was great to be in Newport News as Barry DuVal unveiled the Blueprint and I was particularly interested to see that included within the eight economic drivers making up the blueprint, were educational excellence and workforce readiness—two issues that are critically important to me as a business leader.
Virginia business leaders want to ensure we have the employees we need both today and in the future, but we’re not seeing the workforce we need to stay competitive. Instead, we’re seeing:
- An achievement gap that starts long before a child enters kindergarten—young children from low-income families arriving at school far behind their more advantaged peers; a trend that continues into high school and beyond, resulting in illiteracy, teen pregnancy, dropout rates, and unemployment.
- Nearly 9,000 of Virginia’s graduating class missing in action, failing to graduate with their peers because they either dropped out or were held back.
In order to stay competitive in the global economy, we need to get smart and strategic about how to ensure we have the workforce we need and we need to start early. The way we are currently approaching education is yesterday. While our traditional views and approaches might have been successful in the past, a startling truth has emerged: our students and our future workforce are falling behind. Internationally, our students rank 25th in math and science among 34 countries, behind nations like China, Singapore, and Finland. The things that worked in past, won’t get us to new levels of growth in the global economy.
Investing in early education is truly one of the most strategic investments we can make to propel the state’s economy and ensure Virginia’s competitiveness in the global marketplace. It’s not just the right thing to do, but it’s what Virginia businesses and communities need to succeed.
This is why in 2012, together with a group of business, civic, and philanthropic leaders, we created E3: Elevate Early Education to aggressively pursue and challenge our policy makers to make early education a priority. Join the movement by visiting www.e3va.org, today!
