Nearly a decade after No Child Left Behind promised to remake the American educational system, there remain troubling--and often dismal--trends about precisely what graduating seniors are learning. Today, 27 percent of students drop out of high school before they earn a diploma...Indeed, studies show that 40 percent of students who arrive on community college campuses need some sort of remedial education. What's more, those numbers are routinely higher than the public statistics suggest, says Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education and former governor of West Virginia.

We have one high school in Alexandria, T.C. Williams High School...In the Richmond metro area, 25 percent of high school students do not graduate on time with a regular diploma. This is an estimated 4,000 students from the Class of 2008. According to the Alliance for Excellent Education, if we reduced that number by 50 percent, the likely contributions these 2,000 students could make are significant: The combined earnings of this single class of new graduates would likely be as much as $29 million.

The quality of teachers, how they are paid and school funding are key issues facing public schools nationwide, according to a recent survey...It’s clear from the poll results that Americans understand higher education provides opportunities for higher salaries. Bob Wise, former governor of West Virginia and president of the Alliance for Excellent Education, said it shows that the American public is linking education to economic achievement.

With more than two-thirds of states having adopted the Common Core State Standards in English/language arts and math and moving toward implementation, some experts are pointing to strategies to ensure the process results in equitable access and resources for all students, particularly those considered disadvantaged and lowest-performing...Executing Common Core is made more difficult as 37 governorships are up for reelection this year, and at least 25 governors are term-limited, not running, or not returning, explained Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education .

The growing demand for greatly improved student outcomes combined with continued budget shortfalls in most states is creating a “General Motors Moment” for education; the product was already lackluster and now there is far less revenue to continue turning out what people weren’t buying anyway. Just as General Motors has been forced to reevaluate how it does business, so must education. And if the new electrically powered Chevy Volt is the future of General Motors, technology can be the future for education.

More than eight years after the No Child Left Behind Act was signed into law, some states still aren’t complying with its requirement that they report graduation rates for subgroups of students, such as English-language learners or economically disadvantaged children...A requirement for disaggregation of the graduation rate is “the best way to ensure that there’s not a perverse incentive to push kids out of school,” said Phillip D.C. Lovell, the vice president for federal advocacy for the Alliance for Excellent Education, a Washington-based policy and advocacy group.

About 9,600 ninth-graders have just entered Charlotte-Mecklenburg high schools. If trends continue, 2,880 of them will be gone by the time their classmates graduate in 2014...Cutting the dropout rate in half would pump as much as $25.6 million into the Charlotte region's economy by increased earnings, spending, investment and home sales, mostly among African-Americans and Hispanics, says a study by the Alliance for Excellent Education released this summer.

On Tuesday, nine states and the District of Columbia were named grant winners in the second phase of the U.S. Education Department’s Race to the Top program, a competition for $4.35 billion in federal education-reform funds that was created as part of last year’s economic stimulus package...Some say the effort is already paying off. “More heavy lifting in education reform has already been done than in the past two decades,” says Bob Wise, former governor of West Virginia and president of the Alliance for Excellent Education, which advocates for improved national and federal policies.

Question: What do Harvard, Finland, and the State of Massachusetts have in common? Answer: They each topped their respective “Best of” lists this week...Then take a look at Beloit College’s Annual Mindset List for the Class of 2014, referenced in High School Soup , the new blog of the Alliance for Excellent Education.

Under No Child Left Behind, schools are required to make sure every teacher is “highly qualified,” which—according to the law—means teachers must be certified in the subject areas they teach...In a policy brief titled “Call for Action: Transforming Teaching and Learning to Prepare High School Students for College and Careers,” Mariana Haynes, a senior fellow at the Alliance for Excellent Education (AEE), writes that standards-based reform will continue to fall short in preparing graduates for college and careers without “sustained investments in building the teaching profession and a greater focus on redesigning schools to support teacher and student learning.”