SOUTHFIELD – The winner of The Engineering Society of Detroit’s highest honor announced on June 18 ESD’s “Marshall Plan” to reverse Michigan’s downward spiral in reading and mathematics proficiency.

The winner of ESD’s Horace H. Rackham Humanitarian Award, Christopher J. Webb, made the announcement at ESD’s Annual Benefit Dinner at Cobo Hall.

Drawing from its base of more than 60,000 professionals, 3,000 companies and 50 unions, ESD will create an integrated and optimized educational system that ESD calls the “Pre-K to Job Pipeline” of career or college for youth at risk.

Since 2003, Michigan?s fourth grade reading scores have declined, to the point where Michigan’s performance is the fourth worst among the states. Fully 70 percent of the eighth graders in southeast Michigan can?t read at grade level. So it is a time to rethink the old models and to act out of the box to reverse this debilitating decline.

Building consensus over the past year with the leaders of the city and the Public School District of Hamtramck, ESD has found a welcoming community ready to do just that. The partners call it ?Project Hamtramck.?

Using the facilitative process model of the National Academy of Science — in which stakeholders from industry, labor, academia, nonprofits and government come together — the ESD Institute will convene a three-day symposium this summer with key global best practice providers and the stakeholders of Hamtramck to advance the employability of its youth.

In the symposium, participants will identify common ground for action. They will craft a ?Next Public Education? pipeline based upon reading and math proficiencies from pre-K to 12. And, they will agree to a multi-year nonprofit consortium that will be funded in part on positive learning and behavioral metrics that are verified by independent evaluation.

As the partners accomplish Project Hamtramck, they will generate a model that can be replicated and scaled to communities across Michigan — and is capable of transforming a distressed community to vibrancy and a destination of choice.