If the high school students who dropped out of the Class of 2011 had graduated, the nation’s economy would likely have benefitted from nearly $154 billion in additional income over the course of their lifetimes, according to the Alliance's issue brief, The High Cost of High School Dropouts: What the Nation Pays for Inadequate High Schools.

Noting that the nation is in the midst of a dropout crisis that will cost more than $3 trillion in lost wages over the lifetime of the 12 million students projected to drop out over the next decade, Prioritizing the Nation's Lowest-Performing High Schools calls on federal policymakers to perform "legislative triage" by devoting attention to the lowest-performing high schools and immediately improving or replacing the most severely "injured" schools. It points out that the nation’s lowest-performing high schools may be diverse in size and geographic location, but most all of these schools disproportionally serve low-income students and students of color.

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.

When the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) was drafted and signed into law, little attention was paid to the unique challenges that exist in the nation’s high schools and what is best known about how to improve them. As a result, the law emerged with provisions that often neglect, or that are even at odds with, the needs of America’s millions of high school students, particularly the six million students who are most at risk of dropping out of school each year. The brief describes these design and implementation flaws and how they undermine the educational and equity promises of NCLB at the high school level. In Need of Improvement: NCLB and High Schools calls on Congress to take the opportunity during the reauthorization of the law to build on the ideals of “no child left behind” and pass legislation that will lead the nation toward “every child a graduate.”

Hidden Benefits: The Impact of High School Graduation on Household Wealth demonstrates that if high school dropouts who currently head households in the U.S. had instead earned diplomas, the nation’s economy would benefit from an additional $74 billion in wealth accumulated by families. The wealth gap between high school dropouts and high school graduates is even more severe than the better known income gap.