The alliance calls for secondary education reform that would result in more kids earning a high school dipolma — a key strategy for addressing wealth inequality, said Bob Wise, alliance president. "Education unlocks the door to personal and professional opportunities, as well as paves the road to financial freedom," Wise said.

...across the nation, about half of all new teachers leave within five years. This turnover costs Kentucky about $18 million a year, the Alliance for Excellent Education reports.

Former West Virginia governor and current Alliance for Excellent Education President Bob Wise said that ultimately, CTE has to prove its value to legislators. That value not only must be translated into education, but into dollars and cents, he said. Wise took care to note that governors like nothing better than to announce a new factory or large business opening because it means new jobs for voters.

If high school dropouts of Georgia's class of 2006 had instead earned their diplomas with their classmates, the state's economy could have benefited from an additional $14.2 billion in wages over these students' lifetimes, according to conservative calculations by the Alliance for Excellent Education.

The Alliance for Excellent Education last week released a report showing that, if all heads of households in the United States had graduated from high school, the result would be $74 billion in accumulated wealth. The alliance, a Washington, D.C.-based policy, research, and advocacy organization, said reports of the earnings gap between high school graduates and dropouts give only part of the economic picture.

A new report from the Alliance for Excellent Education finds that the 1.2 million members of the high school Class of 2006 who dropped out before graduating will cost the U.S. economy $309 billion in unearned wages over their lifetimes. Want some even higher math? The analysis projects that 12 million students will drop out over the coming decade, costing the nation $3 trillion in wages not paid.

If the roughly 16.5 million heads of households who quit high school had stuck it out and graduated, the economy would be $74 billion wealthier, the Alliance for Excellent Education estimates.

In 2004, 15,000 students failed to graduate in Oklahoma. The Alliance for Excellent Education, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group, estimates those 15,000 Oklahomans over the course of their lifetimes could cost the state $4 billion in lost wages, tax revenues and productivity. Across the United States, 1.3 million teens failed to graduate, which could cost the nation an estimated $325 billion.

The Alliance for Excellent Education, a Washington-based research group, put out a study in December that said if every high-school senior graduated in 2006, Ohio could have saved $502 million in lifetime health costs. This time, the alliance took a look at U.S. Census data to show how much more wealth all Ohio dropouts could have accumulated had they graduated.

...the National Alliance for Excellent Education in Washington released graduation rates for 10 cities in Connecticut that appeared to be significantly lower than the rates reported by the school districts.