Obama Administration Releases a Blueprint to Overhaul NCLB

This morning, the Obama administration released its blueprint to overhaul the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, currently known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB). In a March 13 video address to the nation previewing the blueprint, President Obama said the plan sets an ambitious goal that all students should graduate from high school prepared for college and a career - no matter who they are or where they come from. Obama acknowledged that achieving the goal will be difficult, but is essential for the country and its children.

"As a nation, we are engaged in many important endeavors: improving the economy, reforming the health care system, encouraging innovation in energy and other growth industries of the 21st century," Obama said. "But our success in these efforts - and our success in the future as a people - will ultimately depend on what happens long before an entrepreneur opens his doors, or a nurse walks the rounds, or a scientist steps into her laboratory. Our future is determined each and every day, when our children enter the classroom, ready to learn and brimming with promise. It's that promise we must help them fulfill."

In a statement, Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education and former governor of West Virginia, said the blueprint places an important focus on the lowest-performing schools, including the lowest-performing high schools. "Half of the nation's dropouts come from 2,000 high schools," Wise said. "We know where these schools are, and we know how to fix them. The president's proposal sets us on a path for doing so."

Read the Gov. Wise's complete statement or download the blueprint.

Lowering High School Dropout Rate Significantly Increases Job Creation, Home Ownership, Spending and Investment Income, and Car Sales, Says New Alliance Study

As a result of a new game-changing study it released on January 12, the Alliance for Excellent Education said there was demonstrated evidence that lowering the high school dropout rate will have important positive implications for the economic vitality of the forty-five largest metropolitan areas in the United States.

The study, “The Economic Benefits from Halving the Dropout Rate: A Boom to Businesses in the Nation’s Largest Metropolitan Areas” measures on a city-by-city basis the growth in jobs, home ownership, levels of spending and investment, and car sales that will result from cutting the high school dropout rate in half.

“The report underscores the notion that the best economic stimulus package is a high school diploma,” he said. “If the U.S. is to improve its competitiveness in the global economy, it must have an education system that meets the fast-growing demand for high-level skills,” concluded Wise.

Find the results for your city or read the press release.

New Report Warns of Limited Impact of Race to the Top, Common Standards, Asserts Congress Must Reauthorize ESEA

While the federal government and the states have implemented some promising education reform efforts in 2010, these efforts will have limited long-term impact and risk undermining accountability if they continue to be pursued without updating and improving the bedrock of federal education policy-the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA, the current version of which is known as the No Child Left Behind Act, or NCLB). Only an ESEA reauthorization can address the aspects of NCLB that time, experience, and research have shown need to be significantly improved or updated.

This report from the Alliance for Excellent Education and the Aspen Institute's Commission on No Child Left Behind, Don't Leave Accountability Behind: A Call for ESEA Reauthorization, describes four distinct reasons ESEA reauthorization is necessary to support long-term reform and ensure strong accountability for student outcomes and improvement.

Read the press release or download the report.

Find A Dropout Factory In Your State

A May 18 editorial in the New York Times calls attention to the approximately 2,000 high schools that produce more than half of the nation's dropouts and close to three-quarters of its minority dropouts.

By focusing on these "dropout factories," as they have been dubbed, the nation stands a good chance of keeping in school millions of students who would otherwise drop out, the editorial reads.

"The dropout problem is fixable. To do that, federal state and local governments must work together to remake the 'dropout factories.' That means putting public money into prevention programs that have been shown to keep children in school.

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.