Encore: Work that matters in the second half of life.

Former Secretary of Education Richard Riley is calling for a $10 billion investment in a major national mobilization to reverse the dropout epidemic in America’s high schools.

Riley’s call echoes the recent “More to Give” report to the AARP, which called for a national initiative to put 100,000 adult mentors and advocates to work at the nation’s 2,000 “dropout factories.”

Such a national mobilization represents an opportunity for tens of thousands of experienced Americans to put their time and talents to work to ensure success for the next generation. Riley and his co-author Terry K. Peterson say boomers who want to give back are one of the best untapped resources for filling the chronic shortage of teachers.

Riley, the former governor of South Carolina who headed the Department of Education under President Bill Clinton, and Peterson, his longtime aide, call for a $10 billion public-private “High School Investment Fund,” to scale-up proven interventions and expand alternative pathways to graduation. They propose that major universities allocate a portion of their bulging endowments to defraying costs for university faculty and students who commit to tutoring, mentoring, and other efforts to keep middle and high school students on track to graduate and advance to college.

Riley and Peterson made the call in a thoughtful commentary in Education Week marking 25 years since the 1983 report, “A Nation at Risk.”

“We must get deadly serious about dramatically increasing the high school graduation rate, which now hovers at 70 percent,” write Riley and Peterson. “One telling fact should put this education dilemma in stark perspective: The annual number of high school dropouts—1.2 million—is more than twice the size of the active-duty U.S. Army. These young people make up an unseen and unwanted ‘army of dropouts,’ and they are the real casualties of a tyranny of low expectations that still bedevils the American education system.

“Increasing the high school graduation rate is, in our opinion, America’s greatest education challenge in the coming decade… Young people who fail to graduate from high school face a bleak economic future, and each dropout costs this nation $260,000 in lost earnings, taxes, and productivity. If these young people don’t get decent-paying jobs, who is going to prop up Social Security as millions of baby boomers begin to retire?

“This ‘dropout army’ is also, according to retired Gen. Colin L. Powell, the former U.S. secretary of state, a national-security issue. How are we to maintain the best army in the world when, year in and year out, more than a million young people can’t even meet its minimum standards?”

Riley and Peterson highlight the encore career opportunity to revive the educational system, citing the recent MetLife/Civic Ventures Encore Career Survey that found that between 5.3 million and 8.4 million Americans are already working in encore careers and 30 percent of them are in education. The survey determined that 50 percent of those not already in an encore career want to have one.

“New teachers are leaving the profession at an alarming rate – 50 percent in the first five years of teaching, by some estimates.” They say this “tumult” will only get worse as baby boomers, who represent 53 percent of the nation’s teaching force, retire in growing numbers.

“We can head off this demographic tsunami if we transform our public schools into learning organizations by retaining high-quality veteran teachers in new and flexible roles that engage their experience and skills in a new way. Those not interested in 21st-century teaching can retire. We also have the opportunity to reach out to a new source of support – the millions of retiring baby boomers who want to give back to society.”

Click here to read the complete commentary.