Hats Off to AT&T for raising the bar.

Remember those old raising the bar ads?

By far one of my favorite slogans of all time. It's an ingenious double entendre (with equally brilliant commercials) and the staffer on the Cingular marketing team who came up with it (they were Cingular ads before rebranding as AT&T) should not only be proud, but is hopefully enjoying a much deserved promotion for this winning concept.

But AT&T isn’t just raising the bar for your cell phone service anymore, they’re now raising it for education as well. (So does that make it a triple entendre?) The company has just announced that they will pledge $100 million to fix our dropout epidemic. The money will go to a four-year effort including grants to schools and nonprofits across the country and the next chapter of major research conducted by John Bridgeland, author of the landmark report The Silent Epidemic.

A focus of the program will be to help students understand that by staying in school they face better jobs and a better life.

"There are as many reasons for dropping out as there are dropouts," said Laure Sanford, president of the AT&T Foundation. "Where the reasons really cluster is around students not being able to easily connect and find relevance in what they are learning in the classroom."

“AT&T Aspire,” as the initiative is being called, (they should have stuck with Raising the Bar!) will include a job shadowing program involving 400,000 AT&T employee hours. The aim is to have 100,000 students across the country see what skills are needed to succeed.

It’s great to see businesses step up and take action. Hats off to AT&T for their commitment to helping kids stay in school, and for truly raising the bar for other companies out there to do the same.