Raising the Grade by the Alliance's Bob Wise Released

On May 2, Raising the Grade: How High School Reform Can Save Our Youth and Our Nation, written by Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education and former governor of West Virginia was released.

In the latest installment of “Wise Words,” Governor Wise draws attention to the reason why he wrote Raising the Grade -- the crisis in America’s high schools that sees over a million students failing to graduate every year.

 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.

New Book by Alliance President Now Available

Raising the Grade: How High School Reform Can Save Our Youth and Our Nation, written by Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education and former governor of West Virginia, describes the alarming cost of the high school crisis and informs citizens, educators, and policymakers about what they can do to ensure that all students receive a quality high school education that prepares them for a successful future.

Every year, approximately 1.2 million students fail to graduate from high school. In Raising the Grade, Governor Wise delves into how the dropout crisis affects every American and combines lessons learned from his twenty-plus years as an elected official with stories of real Americans whose high school experiences failed to adequately prepare them for work or college to make the case for an overhaul of the nation’s high schools.

Click here to order the book.

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.