I 
110TH CONGRESS 
1ST SESSION 
H. R. 887 
To provide for Project GRAD programs, and for other purposes. 
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES 
FEBRUARY 7, 2007 
Mrs. MCCARTHY of New York (for herself and Ms. PRYCE of Ohio) introduced 
the following bill; which was referred to the Committee on Education and 
Labor 
A BILL 
To provide for Project GRAD programs, and for other 
purposes. 
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representa-
tives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, 
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE. 
This Act may be cited as the ‘‘Graduation Really 
Achieves Dreams Act’’ or the ‘‘GRAD Act’’. 
SEC. 2. FINDINGS. 
Congress makes the following findings: 
(1) The national secondary school graduation 
rate is only 70 percent. For the class of 2001, the 
national graduation rate was only 51 percent for Af-
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rican-American students and 52 percent for Latino 
students. 
(2) In our nation’s high poverty urban districts, 
as few as one-third of students graduate from sec-
ondary school. In these places, completion rates 
among certain disadvantaged groups of students are 
often lower still. 
(3) In rural areas, where one-third of American 
students attend school, only 58.8 percent of students 
attend institutions of higher education, compared 
with 68.2 percent of American students from urban 
and suburban areas. 
(4) Each school day, approximately 7,000 sec-
ondary school students drop out of school. 
(5) The 6,000,000 secondary students who 
make up the lowest 25 percent in terms of achieve-
ment scores are 3.5 times more likely to drop out 
than students in the next highest quarter of aca-
demic achievement, and are 20 times more likely to 
drop out than high achieving students. 
(6) Approximately 25 percent of secondary 
school students are reading at ‘‘below basic’’ levels. 
The problem is even more severe for poor students 
of color. The average minority or low-income ninth 
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grader performs at only the fifth or sixth grade level 
in reading. 
(7) Achievement gaps persist across racial and 
socioeconomic lines in rural schools—there are 
2,500,000 poor children in rural areas, and the child 
poverty rate in some rural areas is 2 to 3 times the 
national average. 
(8) Recruiting and retaining good teachers is 
an enormous challenge in rural areas: the average 
salary in rural districts is 13.4 percent lower than 
in nonrural areas; and teachers often teach more 
than 1 subject, teach in poor working conditions, live 
far from colleges, have little access to training, and 
face geographic and social isolation. 
(9) Low graduation rates and college attend-
ance rates are evidence that, in the earlier grades, 
schools are not meeting the fundamental achieve-
ment needs of low-income, minority, and rural stu-
dents. 
(10) Even those students who do graduate from 
secondary schools and go on to college are struggling 
because they lack the basic skills to succeed. Ap-
proximately 40 percent of all 4-year college students 
take a remedial course and 63 percent of all commu-
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