The Alliance for Excellent Education estimates that high school dropouts from the last year’s graduating class will cost the U.S. more than $329 billion in lost wages, taxes and productivity over their lifetimes. Nearly half of all black and American Indian students will not graduate with their class, while less than six in 10 Hispanic students will, the report found.

Under plans previously approved by the department, most states’ rules allow high schools and school districts to escape the NCLB law’s accountability measures even though they make little or no progress in improving graduation rates, said Bethany Little, the vice president for policy at the Alliance for Excellent Education, a Washington advocacy group for high school improvement.

Audio: Former West Virginia Governor Bob Wise says the numbers are accurate. A recently released study estimates a third of the students who enter the ninth grade in the United States do not finish school four years later. Wise, who now works with the Alliance for Excellence in Education, says another third of those students graduate from high school but do so without the skills needed to enter the workforce or go on to higher education.

Policymakers increasingly want to use sophisticated statistical methods to identify effective teachers, but the concept -- known as value-added -- poses particular challenges at the high school level. Problems such as a lack of appropriate assessments, difficulties in isolating teacher effectiveness for each teacher, and political issues are areas for concern, experts said at a discussion March 25 following the release of an Alliance for Excellent Education policy brief about the issue.

"Making education decisions that affect all students without the benefit of fully disaggregated data ignores the unique needs of students of color," said Michael Wotorson, director of the Campaign for High School Equity. Founded in June to examine how the nation's secondary schools serve racial and ethnic minorities, the campaign's members include the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Council of La Raza, the National Indian Education Association, the National Urban League, the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center, the Alliance for Excellent Education and other groups.

How to calculate graduation rates has long been the subject of debate. Efforts are under way among governors, Congress, and the Department of Education to create a more uniform system for accurate tracking and comparison. To some degree, that's a missing link in the current accountability system, since federal law puts more emphasis on test scores. "This case might now get some courts involved in recognizing that graduation rates are an important determinant of the quality of education," says Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education, which tracks state graduation issues.

Education also lowers health-care costs. The Alliance for Excellent Education estimates that if the 1.2 million students who drop out each year earned high school diplomas instead, states could save $17 billion in health-care costs over the graduates’ lifetimes.

North Carolina officials deserve praise for their efforts to figure out how many students really don’t finish high school, and they should keep up efforts to make sure that more graduate, said Bob Wise, the former governor of West Virginia.

More effective teaching in high schools will get its biggest boost from a variety of high-quality assessments of student learning, according to a policy brief from a group that advocates for high school students in danger of dropping out or graduating with low skills...[according to] the Washington-based Alliance for Excellent Education, which released the brief at a panel discussion held here March 25.

Former Gov. Bob Wise, now head of the Alliance for Excellent Education, warned: "Almost one-third of students won't graduate. Another third will not graduate ready for college or the modern workplace."