Report Round-Up

Happy Friday, everyone. Here's this week's Report Round-Up. If there's a report we missed, feel free to add it in the comments section.

This week's reports are below...

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Morning Announcements: July 29, 2011

Education Week reports that during an interview on Wednesday with U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA), he declined to be more specific about exactly when the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee would get around to marking up the very, very long-overdue Elementary and Secondary Education Act bill (renewal has been pending since 2007, back when President George W. Bush was in office).

While developing his positions on education policy, Sen. Al Franken (D-MN), also a member of the Senate HELP Committee, told the Huffington Post that education reform is the “most important thing I’m working on.”

According to another article in the Huffington Post, Microsoft founder Bill Gates told the National Urban League on Thursday that education reformers must “end the myth” that poverty needs to be eradicated before reforming education.

Accurate dropout figures are very hard to find because most states do not adequately collect or analyze the data, and part of the problem is that every state has had a different definition for dropout, says NPR.

CNN writes about one good teacher’s decision to quit after a successful thirteen-year teaching career.

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Afternoon Announcements: July 28, 2011

News outlets all over the nation are talking about states bracing for plummeting high school graduation rates as districts nationwide dump flawed measurement formulas that often undercounted dropouts and produced inflated results. According to CBS News, “experts hope the changes will draw attention to the dropout issue and lead to resources being focused on the problem. … 'We’re going to take an honest look in the mirror and see how real our graduation rate is and where we need to cut the dropout rate,' said former West Virginia Gov. Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education, which has extensively studied the nation’s hodgepodge system of graduation rates. 'You’ve got to know how deep the hole is in order to develop a strategy for getting out of it.'”

NPR finishes out its five-part series “School’s Out: America’s Dropout Crisis” with this story:

Part 5: A High School Dropout’s Midlife Hardships
Today, the people who seem to be hurting the most in our sputtering economy are dropouts in their 30s, 40s and 50s.

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Stats That Stick: July 27, 2011

High school graduates earn a national average of $8,000 more annually compared to high school dropouts. (Alliance for Excellent Education)

Nearly 87 percent of New Mexico’s schools are not making adequate progress under the federal No Child left Behind (NCLB) Act. When it comes to student proficiency, only 42 percent of New Mexico students perform at grade level in math and science and only 50 percent are proficient in Reading. (New Mexico Public Education Department)

The number of Louisiana public schools considered failing—or “academically unacceptable”—under the state’s accountability program jumped from 48 last year to 135 this year. (Education Week)

Students with disciplinary actions were five times more likely to drop out (10 percent) than students with no disciplinary action (2 percent), according to a new study of nearly one million Texas secondary school students released by the Council of State Governments. Additionally, students with disciplinary actions were more than six times more likely (31 percent) to be held back at least once, compared to students without (5 percent).

 

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Morning Announcements: July 27, 2011

As states tally their standardized test scores and graduation rates this summer, they are feeling the squeeze of the 2001 No Child Left Behind law, which Congress has failed to revamp since it came up for reauthorization in 2007, reports the Huffington Post.

According to Maine's Bangor Daily News, Gov. Paul LePage issued an order yesterday that takes a first step toward giving the state’s students the option of a five-year high school education.

In another Bangor Daily News article, author and education expert Tony Wagner is quoted from his keynote address at a conference at the University of Maine, during which he talked about the education system built in the past century and how it is failing today’s students.

NPR continues its series “School’s Out: America’s Dropout Crisis” with this fourth story in the five-part series:

Part 4: Despite Interventions, No-Show Students Drop Out
In Baltimore, the vast majority of kids who never finish school drop out because of extreme poverty, homelessness, and a drug epidemic that has left some neighborhoods desolate and dangerous. In the toughest neighborhoods, kids miss lots of school days, and that puts them at risk of dropping out. Now, Baltimore’s efforts are driven toward reaching these children early.

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Afternoon Announcements: July 26, 2011

The Huffington Post writes that Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO), a former superintendent of Denver’s public schools, sees the holdup on overhauling No Child Left Behind as having little to do with education and everything to do with politics: “I’ve learned more about how schools work than how the United States Senate works … For the life of me, it’s hard to see why we can’t make progress on this.”

As part of NPR’s special series “School’s Out: America’s Dropout Crisis,” Claudio Sanchez tells the first three stories in the five-part series:

Part 1: From Drug Dealing To Diploma, A Teen’s Struggle
No statistic in education is more damning than the nation’s dropout rate. Almost four million students start ninth grade every year. One in four won’t graduate.

Part 2: A Young Mom Resists A Cycle Of Failure
Of the million or so kids who drop out of school every year, nearly half are girls. They drop out for the same reasons boys do: they skip school, fall behind academically and they’re bored. But the single biggest reason girls drop out is because they get pregnant.

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July 25 Issue of Straight A's Is Available

The July 25, 2011 issue of Straight A's, the Alliance's biweekly newsletter is now available.

This week's issue focuses on President Obama's Education Roundtable with key leaders from the nation's businesses; a new Alliance study showing the annual income difference between a high school dropout and a high school graduate in every state (It's an average of $8,000); and new reports on the economy's need for more college graduates and the link between school discipline and high school dropouts in Texas.

Individual articles from this week's issue are listed below or you can download a .pdf of the entire newsletter at http://www.all4ed.org/files/Volume11No15.pdf.

 

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Afternoon Announcements: July 25, 2011

A decade into his record-breaking education philanthropy, Bill Gates talks to the Wall Street Journal about teachers, charters—and regrets: “It’s hard to improve public education—that’s clear. … It’s been about a decade of learning.” Since 2000, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has poured some $5 billion into education grants and scholarships.

Of more than 100,000 public schools in the United States, about 300 recently have faced suspicions, allegations and, in some cases hard proof, that teachers and administrators cheated to inflate standardized test scores. The Washington Post reports on questions raised in these incidents that have sent tremors through the movement to hold schools and teachers accountable for student achievement through annual testing.

According to an article in Education Week, South Korea plans to replace paper textbooks with digital content.

 

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