Setting the Stage for New High Schools: Expanding Alternatives...

On July 10, Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and Nashville Mayor Karl Dean appeared at a Capitol Hill briefing cohosted by the Alliance for Excellent Education and the National League of Cities (NLC) to discuss the importance of ensuring that all students—including those who are struggling, those at risk of dropping out, and those who may have left school—are prepared for college and success in the workforce.

The briefing also featured alternative high school advocates and practitioners who discussed the Alternative High School Initiative spearheaded by the NLC’s Institute for Youth, Education, and Families.

Read the summary and view video from the event...

 No Child Left Behind Reauthorization

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) has helped to focus the nation’s attention on the unacceptable achievement gap and the imperative of improving outcomes for all students, especially the most disadvantaged. But the needs of secondary schools are almost ignored in NCLB; therefore federal policy does little to support effective change. Further, little federal funding ever reaches high schools. NCLB reauthorization offers the opportunity to develop an appropriate role for the federal government that supports middle and high school reform across the country. 

Read more about how NCLB affects high schools, the Alliance’s call for reauthorization, recommendations, Congressional testimony, and information about key pieces of high school legislation.

A Graduation Rate For All 

In the latest installment of "Wise Words," Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education and former governor of West Virginia, examines what corporate fraud, mail package delivery, the IRS, and high school graduation rates have in common. 

And more importantly, Wise discusses what we can do now to improve both graduation measurements and results for hundreds of thousands of students. He references the recent Diplomas Count 2008 report, the Alliance’s state cards, and a letter that the Alliance and others sent to the U.S. Department of Education on how to better calculate and report graduation rates, and how to hold schools and districts accountable for graduating all students. 

Alliance Releases the The High Cost of High School Dropouts

Had the more than 1.2 million students who dropped out of the Class of 2008 graduated, the nation’s economy would have benefited from an additional $319 billion in income over the course of their lifetimes.

So says The High Cost of High School Dropouts: What the Nation Pays for Inadequate High Schools, a newly released issue brief from the Alliance for Excellent Education.

Click here to view the press release...

Find A Dropout Factory In Your State

Official “dropout” statistics neither accurately count nor report the number of students who do not graduate from high school. Read the Associated Press article on "dropout factories," the almost 2,000 high schools identified by Johns Hopkins University researchers that lose more than 40 percent of their students between 9th and 12th grades.

Alliance for Excellent Education President Bob Wise appeared on NPR’s The Diane Rehm Show to talk about dropout factories. Listen to archived audio of the program.

While not a graduation rate, a school’s “promoting power” is a good indicator of how well schools are educating their students. See how high schools across the country perform by going to the Promoting Power database . High schools with promoting power less than 60 percent are considered dropout factories. To learn more about the confusing ways that graduation rates are calculated, read the Alliance’s fact sheets on Understanding Graduation Rates.