Afternoon Announcements: December 8, 2011

It's more like evening announcements since more than likely you're bolting for the door to get home or sitting in traffic attempting to get there but here are the "afternoon" announcements. The Alliance for Excellent Education brings you the latest in education news for the day.

In a reoccurring theme of the adverse effect dropping out of high school places on the American economy, the Associated Press details a new report released by a Chicago-based educational non-profit that indicates high school dropouts in the state of Illinois earn less during their lifetimes, cost government and the public more and are more likely to be incarcerated than those who graduate.

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Afternoon Announcements: November 7, 2011

The Washington Times reports that key lawmakers and educators are growing increasingly pessimistic that Congress can pass a massive overhaul of federal education policy before the 2012 election-year battles doom any hopes for major bipartisan legislation. To that point, Alliance President Bob Wise is quoted, saying, “Education is really about the only issue left that has not managed to make itself totally toxic. If Congress really resents the waiver proposal, then they have an obligation to act now. It’s not fair to states to begin implementing significant changes and then suddenly change all of the rules on them. The longer Congress waits, the more the waivers take effect.”

Gaston Caperton, president of the College Board, writes about education and the 2012 election in a Huffington Post op-ed.

Middle and high school science classes are holding kids’ interests; surveys show the number of college freshmen interested in majoring in a STEM field (science, technology, engineering, and math) is on the rise. But as these new coeds fight their way upstream through a flood of calculus, physics, and chemistry in lecture halls with hundreds of other students, the excitement quickly wanes leaving many swimming for shore. Read more in the New York Times about on why science majors change their minds.

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Afternoon Announcements: October 13, 2011

Education Week reports that the sprawling Elementary and Secondary Education Act reauthorization bill put forward yesterday by the chairman of the Senate education committee envisions major programs both for literacy and STEM education. “This is an important provision, and we are pleased to see it included in the draft bill,” said Phillip Lovell, vice president for federal advocacy at the Alliance for Excellent Education. “This proposal takes a comprehensive approach to strengthening literacy by recognizing that students need literacy support and instruction throughout their education.”

Today, the Washington Post highlights education historian Diane Ravitch’s recent blog post “Why Finland’s schools are great (by doing what we don’t).”

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution writes about the Alliance’s recently released report on improving teacher quality by improving the induction of teachers, citing “In 1987–88, the most common experience level of teachers was 15 years. Twenty years later, it was one year.”

Louisiana leads the nation in high school dropouts, as according to the Public Affairs Research Council of Louisiana, one of every six students in the state fails to make it to graduation. “In Louisiana, which has one of the highest poverty rates in the country, the financial impact of the dropout rate is significant. The Alliance for Excellent Education … estimates that dropouts from Louisiana’s class of 2008 could cost the state roughly $6.9 billion in lost wages over their lifetimes,” says the report. (via WWLTV.com in Louisiana)

According to the Huffington Post, YouTube has a Teacher’s Channel that provides teachers with instructions on how to make and upload videos and how to incorporate existing videos in their classroom instruction.

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Alliance Responds to Draft Legislation to Revise No Child Left Behind

On October 11, U.S. Senators Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Mike Enzi (R-WY), the chairman and top Republican, respectively, of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee (HELP) Committee, released draft legislation to revise the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, currently known as No Child Left Behind.

"Patience is no virtue in education reform, and the nation's students have waited long enough for more effective education policy coming from Washington," said Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education and former governor of West Virginia, in response to the draft legislation. "With this bill, they are one step closer to getting it."

Wise said the draft legislation is "especially important" for the nation's high schools, which he said had been "overlooked" by federal education policy for far too long. Specifically, Wise noted the legislation would concentrate improvement efforts on high schools with graduation rates below 60 percent, establish a common, accurate calculation of graduation rates, and support comprehensive efforts by states to strengthen the literacy skills of all students, including young people in high school. Read Entire Post

Report Round-Up: October 7, 2011

Here is a round-up of this week's education-related reports! Read Entire Post

VIDEO: A System Approach to Building a World-Class Teaching Profession

The Alliance for Excellent Education and the New Teacher Center held a briefing on October 4 for a discussion about the role of states and districts in supporting new teachers through comprehensive induction. A new Alliance policy brief was released at the event—“A System Approach to Building a World-Class Teaching Profession: The Role of Induction”—that examines research on teacher turnover and performance and implications for designing induction supports and professional learning as part of a coherent teacher development system.Check out the full video of the event here or by clicking on the image to the left. You can also watch the webinar that followed the the event here. Read Entire Post

Gov. Bob Wise Named to NonProfit Times’ Top 50 Most Influential Executives

On September 15, Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education and former governor of West Virginia, was named one of the NonProfit Times’ “Power & Influence Top 50,” which honors the fifty most influential executives in the sector for the previous twelve months. Other individuals honored include Bill Gates, cofounder of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Helene D. Gayle, president and chief executive officer of CARE USA; and A. Barry Rand, chief executive officer of AARP.

“I’m extremely honored to be named to the NonProfit Times’ ‘Power & Influence Top 50,’ but credit for this award goes to the extremely dedicated and hard-working staff at the Alliance for Excellent Education, as well as to the teachers and educators who are on the front line educating our students,” Wise said.

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Morning Announcements: August 16, 2011

The Associated Press reported on the large number of students requiring remediation courses once they enter college. Thousands of high school graduates feel or are unprepared for college once they graduate from high school, and one in three students entering a public institution take at least one remediation class. This can cause a large financial loss to families and taxpayers, Bob Wise, former governor of West Virginia and president of the Alliance, told the AP.  "We have a real preparation problem in middle and high school for kids on the bubble," Wise said. "It's a duplication of resources. Everybody loses." Read the full article here.

Montana became the first state to receive a waiver from No Child Left Behind, meaning it will receive federal education funding despite many of its schools failing to meet federal standards, reports U.S. News & World Report. All of the recent developments regarding NCLB waivers is making it hard to remember which state is doing what. Check out the Center on Education Policy's helpful map to track developments daily.

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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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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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