If the nation is to truly meet the goal of every child a graduate, we must hold schools responsible for graduating every student with a regular diploma, particularly poor and minority students. Unfortunately, current education accountability systems virtually ignore high school graduation rates. Every Student Counts: The Case for Graduation Rate Accountability summarizes such shortcomings in the No Child Left Behind Act and calls on policymakers to take action on four specific recommendations that will alleviate the unintended consequences of weak graduation rate accountability.

The Alliance for Excellent Education has selected six presentations for its upcoming High School Achievement Forum series, which will take place over a twelve-month period beginning in the fall of 2008. The presentations, chosen from open-call proposals, best represent the series’ theme, “Preparing All Students for College and Work,” and reflect a variety of strategies to improve the nation’s secondary schools.

Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education and former governor of West Virginia, issued a statement on the endorsement of the Graduation Promise Act and the GRADUATES Act by the nation’s mayors during the U.S. Conference of Mayors’ annual meeting this week...

If all of the U.S. high school dropouts from the Class of 2008 had instead earned diplomas along with their classmates, the U.S. economy could have benefited from an additional $320 billion in wages over these students’ lifetimes. So say conservative calculations made by the Alliance for Excellent Education that were published in The High Cost of High School Dropouts: What the Nation Pays for Inadequate High Schools.

If the high school dropouts from the Class of 2008 had instead earned diplomas along with their classmates, the nation’s economy could have benefited from an additional $320 billion in wages, taxes, and productivity over these students’ lifetimes, according to conservative calculations by the Alliance for Excellent Education in its updated brief The High Cost of High School Dropouts: What the Nation Pays for Inadequate High Schools.

Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education and former governor of West Virginia, reacts to today’s release of the report Diplomas Count 2008: School to College: Can State P-16 Councils Ease the Transition? by the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center...

In the newly released book, Raising the Grade: How High School Reform Can Save Our Youth and Our Nation (Jossey-Bass), Governor Bob Wise, former governor of West Virginia and one of the nation’s leading experts on high school reform, draws attention to the crisis in America’s high schools that sees approximately 1.2 million students failing to graduate every year, and calls for a federal response to this pressing issue.

Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education and former governor of West Virginia, speaking at a White House briefing this morning, called on Congress to address the nation’s high school dropout crisis.

Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education and former governor of West Virginia, issued a statement in response to U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings’s announcement today of new high school graduation rate regulations...

Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education and former governor of West Virginia, issued a statement in reaction to the results from Pennsylvania’s primary election...