Afternoon Announcements: December 9, 2011

In just a matter of hours you can kick back and relax for the weekend; you've earned it. In the meantime, enjoy the winding down of the work week with the latest in education news.

Schools around the country are venturing away from requiring students to "test out" of a grade or graduate in general. According to Education Week, Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee are changing their policies so that students will no longer be required to take those tests, according to a new report by the Center on Education Policy.

Bob Wise and Ed Rust Op-ed in The Huffington Post

Check out this op-ed by Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education and former governor of West Virginia, and Edward B. Rust Jr., chairman of the board and chief executive officer of State Farm Mutual® and its principal affiliates.

Boosting Graduation Rates

By: Bob Wise and Edward B. Rust Jr.
 
Last Tuesday, Vice President Joe Biden issued a call to boost college graduation rates across the country and meet President Obama's goal of the United States having the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020. A key component of reaching that goal is graduating more students from high school. Every year, more than one million students leave high school without a diploma.

Most individuals understand the importance of furthering their education. Currently, high school dropouts are over three times more likely to be unemployed than are college graduates. Over the course of his or her lifetime a high school dropout earns, on average, about $260,000 less than a high school graduate. However, results from a new study conducted by the Alliance for Excellent Education and funded by State Farm®, demonstrate that individuals are not the only ones who benefit from better educational outcomes -- we all do.

According to the study, cutting the national high school dropout rate in half for the Class of 2010 would mean these "new graduates" would likely earn an additional $7.6 billion in an average year, which translates to an additional $5.6 billion in spending and another $2 billion in investments across the nation. This increased spending and investments would likely lead to 54,000 new jobs and an annual increase in the gross domestic product (GDP) of $9.6 billion. It is important to remember that these numbers represent the value of decreasing the dropout rate for a single high school class, but the cumulative benefits over a longer period of time would be exponentially greater.

Moving from an Education Funnel to a Pipeline

On Tuesday, Vice President Joe Biden issued a call to increase college graduation rates across the meet President Obama’s goal for the United States having the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020.  Vice President Biden spoke at GradNation, an event sponsored by the America’s Promise Alliance, Alliance for Excellent Education, Civic Enterprises, and the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University. During his remarks, he said: 

“Right now we’ve got an education system that works like a funnel when we need it to work like a pipeline. We have to make the same commitment to getting folks across the graduation stage that we did to getting them into the registrar’s office. The dreams and skills of our college graduates will pave the way to a bright economic future for our nation.”

In order to increase college graduation rates we must first help more students earn their high school diploma. A study released by the Alliance for Excellent Education on Tuesday finds that nationwide, an estimated 1.3 million students dropped out from the Class of 2010 without earning a diploma.

Morning Announcements: March 22, 2011

Today at the first annual Building a GradNation Summit,  Vice President Joe Biden announced a new campaign calling for states to boost their college graduation rates. The effort includes a $20 million Comprehensive Grant Program for states that carry out plans intended to increase their graduation rates. The administration also released a tool kit of strategies to help governors meet college graduation goals, like stabilizing tuition increases, singling out adults with some college experience but no degree, and making it easier for students to transfer college credits. Read stories by the Associated Press and the New York Times.

Also released at the summit was a report finding that the number of U.S. schools considered "dropout factories" has decreased by 6.4 percent between 2008 and 2009, Education Week reports. Read more about this report in a piece written by the report authors in the Huffington Post. The Hartford Courant also writes about what these report findings mean for Connecticut.

The Contra Costa Times reports on a new study finding that more than 10 percent of California school districts are in financial trouble. 

Florida Education Commissioner Eric Smith will resign at the end of this school year according to the Miami Herald.