Student Engagement in High School as a Dropout Prevention Strategy

On September 12, the Alliance for Excellent Education and the Forum for Education and Democracy cohosted a forum on Capitol Hill that featured Congressman Rubén Hinojosa and Linda Darling-Hammond, Pedro Noguera, and George Wood of the Forum for Education and Democracy.

The presenters discussed ways to improve teacher effectiveness in low-performing high schools, how to improve outcomes for over-age and under-credited students, and lessons learned from high-poverty, high-minority population schools.

View video from the event...

 No Child Left Behind Reauthorization

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) has helped to focus the nation’s attention on the unacceptable achievement gap and the imperative of improving outcomes for all students, especially the most disadvantaged. But the needs of secondary schools are almost ignored in NCLB; therefore federal policy does little to support effective change. Further, little federal funding ever reaches high schools. NCLB reauthorization offers the opportunity to develop an appropriate role for the federal government that supports middle and high school reform across the country. 

Read more about how NCLB affects high schools, the Alliance’s call for reauthorization, recommendations, Congressional testimony, and information about key pieces of high school legislation.

Report: From No Child Left Behind to Every Child a Graduate
This report outlines the Alliance for Excellent Education’s Framework for Action to Improve Secondary Schools, which reflects the consensus among educators, researchers, policymakers, and other authorities on the specific problems of secondary schools, as well as on the research- and best-practice-supported solutions to those problems. Taken together, the seven policy areas contained within the framework offer a comprehensive and systemic approach to secondary school reform.

Report: Dropouts, Diplomas, and Dollars: U.S. High Schools and the Nation’s Economy
The United States can no longer absorb the costs and losses associated with an education system that produces more than 1.2 million dropouts every year. This report examines the impact of this crisis on the dropouts themselves, as well as its effect on the economy, social fabric, and security of the nation, states, and local communities.

Brief: Early-Warning Data to Improve Graduation Rates: Closing Cracks in the Education System
This brief explores the power of early-warning data in predicting whether a student will drop out, offers examples of current efforts to use such data to guide secondary school interventions across the country, and discusses the policies that can support these efforts.

Find A Dropout Factory In Your State

Official “dropout” statistics neither accurately count nor report the number of students who do not graduate from high school. Read the Associated Press article on "dropout factories," the almost 2,000 high schools identified by Johns Hopkins University researchers that lose more than 40 percent of their students between 9th and 12th grades.

Alliance for Excellent Education President Bob Wise appeared on NPR’s The Diane Rehm Show to talk about dropout factories. Listen to archived audio of the program.

While not a graduation rate, a school’s “promoting power” is a good indicator of how well schools are educating their students. See how high schools across the country perform by going to the Promoting Power database . High schools with promoting power less than 60 percent are considered dropout factories. To learn more about the confusing ways that graduation rates are calculated, read the Alliance’s fact sheets on Understanding Graduation Rates.