Dive Summary:

• Texas A&M University on Monday unveiled EmpowerU, a new program aimed at monitoring students from the time they enter kindergarten until they graduate from college.
• Of 13,540 students who entered the Texas A&M system in 2004, 5,000 had not completed a degree in six years, and system chancellor John Sharp says the easiest way to begin addressing that issue is to start at the day a student enters kindergarten, as opposed to 18.
• EmpowerU's broad goals include measuring the productivity of teachers the system's education programs graduate, improving math and science training for elementary school teachers, smoothing the transition from high school to college and, hopefully, tracking how well specific groups of students from various schools are performing in different disciplines.

From the article:

Texas A&M University will unveil an ambitious plan here on Monday to fix a leaky educational pipeline by monitoring students from the time they enter kindergarten until they graduate from college. The program, which it calls EmpowerU, is the result of a year-long brainstorming process among leaders of the sprawling system's 11 diverse campuses. It started with a sobering look at the number of students who fail to graduate and the economic toll that takes on the state. ...