Recognizing that no tool is more important than information to help educators and other advocates improve the country’s educational system, the College Board and the Alliance for Excellent Education have formed a partnership to develop a series of fact sheets highlighting the state of American schools and their students.

The third in a multi-issue series provides a “Facts for Education Advocates” feature focusing on the demographics and racial divide in today’s schools.

By 2050, the U.S. Census Bureau projects that about 50 percent of the U.S. population will be African- American, Hispanic, or Asian. Given these steep demographic shifts, the performance of students of color and the characteristics of the schools they attend are important factors that must concern all Americans. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, African-American students made up 16 percent of the public school population in 2004. These students, disproportionately concentrated in high-poverty, low-performing schools, are vulnerable to poor educational outcomes that undermine their chances for success in life.

Recognizing that no tool is more important than information to help educators and other advocates improve the country’s educational system, the College Board and the Alliance for Excellent Education have formed a partnership to develop a series of fact sheets highlighting the state of American schools and their students.

The second in a multi-issue series. After a summer hiatus, the series continues with a “Facts for Education Advocates” feature in this edition discussing some of the economic benefits of education.

Recognizing that no tool is more important than information to help educators and other advocates improve the country’s educational system, the College Board and the Alliance for Excellent Education have formed a partnership to develop a series of fact sheets highlighting the state of American schools and their students.

The multi-issue series debuts with an overview of education in the United States; after a summer hiatus, the series will begin again in September and continue throughout the 2008-2009 school year, with the monthly release of additional fact sheets that address a range of education topics.

Over the past thirty years, the modern workplace has radically changed, and the demands on those making the transition from the classroom to the workforce continue to rise. Students from Birmingham and Boston no longer compete against each other for jobs; instead, their rivals are well-educated students from Sydney and Singapore. But as globalization has progressed, American educational progress has stagnated. Today, the United States’ high school graduation rate ranks near the bottom among developed nations belonging to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). And on virtually every international assessment of academic proficiency, American secondary school students’ performance varies from mediocre to poor.

How effective is your community's high school in educating its students? You don't have to be a school superintendent or member of Congress to help the six million students most at risk of failing to graduate from high school. Drawing from the work of leading researchers and educators from around the country, the Alliance for Excellent Education has identified ten key elements that every high school should have in place to ensure that all its students are successful. The list includes challenging classes, a safe learning environment, and skilled teachers. Whether you are a parent seeking a stronger education for your child, a business owner in need of a well-trained workforce, or a concerned citizen joining with others to improve schools, this checklist can help you identify the strengths and weaknesses of your community schools and guide you in determining the actions you can take to help improve them.

Because Asian American students as a group score higher than any other race on proficiency tests, many observers assume that there is no need to be concerned about their collective academic progress. Asian American students are often stereotyped as the “model minority,” and it is assumed that most of them do extremely well academically, especially in math and science. Because of the lack of disaggregated data, the Asian American statistics primarily reflect East Asians’ overall academic successes and obscure the scholastic struggles of groups such as Southeast Asians and Pacific Islanders. It is clear that many Asian Pacific Islander American students are not being adequately served by the nation’s public schools. Changes in the way they are educated must be made if America is to meet the goal of preparing all K–12 students for college, work, and life.

Teachers make the greatest impact on students—what they learn, how they learn it, and what they do with it. Decades of research clearly demonstrate that a quality teacher, more than any other factor, enables students to overcome obstacles to learning (like poverty) and can even erase the achievement gap. The problem is that many teachers lack the skills and opportunities they need to become high-quality educators. And those who are most qualified work in schools where students are doing fairly well on their own.