Improving the quality of public high schools through the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act is a voting issue for over eight in ten voters, according to a new national poll released today by the Alliance for Excellent Education. Additionally, over half of voters say that their decision to vote for a current elected official in the 2010 congressional elections will be affected if Congress takes no action to reform the law currently known as the No Child Left Behind Act.

Lowering the high school dropout rate among students of color will greatly increase the nation’s economic vitality, according to a dramatic new study, The Economic Benefits of Reducing the Dropout Rate Among Students of Color in the Nation’s Forty-Five Largest Metropolitan Areas, that the Alliance for Excellent Education released today.

Gov. Wise: “Zip codes might be great for sorting mail, but they should not determine the quality of a child’s education.” This morning, the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and Council of Chief State School Officers released the final version of the common core state standards in English language arts and mathematics. In response, Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education and former governor of West Virginia, made the following statement:

Five metropolitan areas in West Virginia could see significant gains in their local economies were they to cut by half the dropout rate for just a single high school class, according to new data from the Alliance for Excellent Education. The study, which includes Charleston, Huntington, Morgantown, Weirton, and Wheeling, is a supplement to a larger national study that measures on a city-by-city basis the growth in several areas, including home ownership and mortgage values, levels of spending and investment, and car sales based on cutting the high school dropout rate in half in the nation’s largest cities and their surrounding metropolitan areas.

New state profiles from the Alliance for Excellent Education offer evidence for why all states would benefit from adopting common standards and assessments in English language arts and math that result in all high school students graduating college and career ready.

Although reading and writing have become essential skills for almost every job, the majority of students do not read or write well enough to meet grade-level demands. A new report from Carnegie Corporation of New York and published by the Alliance for Excellent Education (the Alliance) finds that while the two skills are closely connected, writing is an often-overlooked tool for improving reading skills and content learning. Writing to Read: Evidence for How Writing Can Improve Reading identifies three core instructional practices that have been shown to be effective in improving student reading.

In advance of an April 13 Senate hearing on school turnaround, a new brief from the Alliance for Excellent Education released today calls on Congress to address the approximately two thousand high schools that account for nearly half of the nation's dropouts. According to the brief, Prioritizing the Nation's Lowest-Performing High Schools, these schools exist in every state and in 80 percent of congressional districts.

In recommendations provided to the U.S. Congress, the Alliance for Excellent Education calls for an overhaul of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA)—currently known as No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB)—that would hold states, districts, and schools accountable for graduating students from high school ready for college and careers. To help states, districts, and schools meet this goal, the Alliance recommends that ESEA reauthorization support school improvement systems tailored to meet their specific needs while providing the resources necessary to turn around low-performing middle and high schools.

In response to Secretary Duncan's announcement of Delaware and Tennessee as the winners in phase one of the $4.35 billion Race to the Top (RTT) competition, Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education and former governor of West Virginia, made the following statement:

In response to today's release of the Nation's Report Card: Reading 2009, Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education and former governor of West Virginia, made the following statement: