Gov. Wise Testifies Before House Ed and Labor Committee
In testimony before the House Committee on Education and Labor on May 12, Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education and former governor of West Virginia, said failure of federal policy to address the needs of high schools will lead to an economic crisis that will be greater than the combined cost of bailing out banks, financial institutions, the auto industry, and AIG.
Raising the Grade
Alliance Partners
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Alliance Releases New Brief on High School Performance Indicators
On June 29, the Alliance for Excellent Education released a new policy brief that calls for the use of more sophisticated indicators that can determine the factors that contribute to a school’s poor performance, guide the development of improvement strategies, and measure interim progress along the way.
“The ‘check engine’ light on your car tells you that you need to look under the hood, but it can’t tell you which specific part you need to replace,” said Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education and former governor of West Virginia. “Similarly, test scores and graduation rates can identify problem schools, but they can’t tell you why they’re low-performing. It’s time to move from simply looking underneath the hood to fixing the problem.”
The brief, Moving Beyond AYP: High School Performance Indicators, outlines a number of high school performance indicators that research has shown are predictive of high school graduation and college and career readiness. They include attendance, course success, on-track-to-graduation status, course-taking patterns, success on college- and career-ready assessments, postsecondary success rates, and school climate. It also describes the research behind these indicators, measurement options and challenges, and current use across the nation.
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.
Alliance Report Examines How Better Assessments Can Improve Outcomes for High School Students
Federal policy must support a radically different system of assessments if the United States is to succeed in preparing all students for college and career, according to a new publication, released June 24 by the Alliance for Excellent Education. Meaningful Measurement: The Role of Assessments in Improving High School Education in the Twenty-First Century, a new collection of essays written by leading experts, discusses important assessment issues, examines promising assessment practices from across the globe, and offers recommendations on how the federal government can support an assessment agenda for the twenty-first century.
Chapter authors include Andreas Schleicher of the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), Linda Darling-Hammond and Ray Pecheone of the School Redesign Network at Stanford, Rick Stiggins of the ETS Assessment Training Institute, and Judy Wertzel, formerly of the Aspen Institute.
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.
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Jun 29 2009 Issue Now Available for
Thoughts on Education By Gov. Bob Wise
"Over the Top" Campaign (May 28, 2009)
Federal Policy
Federal government leadership is critical in advancing secondary school reform, but current federal policy and funding do not effectively support improving achievement in the nation’s middle and high schools.
High Schools in
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Elements of a Successful High School
Learn about the Ten Key Elements that every high school should have in place to ensure that all of its students are successful.