A few days ago Microsoft announced that along with Boeing, they would be putting up $25 million each towards funding college scholarships in Washington State. Now Microsoft has announced that they will be looking into ways that the company can assist with K-12 education.

Brad Smith, Microsoft’s chief legal council had this to say in a recent interview following the scholarship announcement.

“It’s important to build on the momentum from higher education next year for K-12.” Smith said. He said he hasn’t identified the one thing that the K-12 education system needs. “We need an effort to bring people together to figure that out. A lot of people all think they have that ‘one thing’ but they’re all a different ‘one thing.’ ”

“If there’s a single rallying cry, it might be around the high dropout rate,” Smith said. “We’re losing 29,000 people every year in terms of the dropout rate. That means this decade we’re going to produce 300,000 high school dropouts. That’s almost six percent of the state’s population.”

Smith states that dialogue around K-12 reminds him of the conversations on higher education. “It is reminiscent of the conversation the governor had last June to have a task force on higher education. It was a year ago to the day that the prevailing notino was nothing could get done in higher education” in Olympia, he said.

Microsoft’s interest, Smith said, is to make sure the state is educating students for future jobs in technology.

[Cross-posted at Winextra]