In November 2011, eleven states submitted applications to the U.S. Department of Education (ED) for waivers from key provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act. Although the waiver process presents an opportunity to strengthen college and career readiness among the nation’s high school students, this analysis by the Alliance for Excellent Education finds that many state applications could have the unintended consequence of weakening high school graduation rate accountability. High school graduation rates account for 14 percent to 30 percent of state accountability indexes. With graduation rates counting for such a small portion of the overall accountability indexes, schools could have an incentive to push out low-achieving students in order to increase overall scores on achievement tests and other measures of college and career readiness.

If the high school students who dropped out of the Class of 2011 had graduated, the nation’s economy would likely have benefitted from nearly $154 billion in additional income over the course of their lifetimes, according to the Alliance's issue brief, The High Cost of High School Dropouts: What the Nation Pays for Inadequate High Schools.

About 15 percent of the American workforce of 3.5 million teachers either moves or leaves the profession each year. The size of the teaching force coupled with the high annual turnover rates seriously compromises the nation‘s capacity to ensure that all students have access to skilled teaching. If the dominant teacher workforce policies and practices remain unchanged, then the aspirations of the common core standards and aligned assessments will simply continue a legacy of unfulfilled reforms. This brief addresses the need for coherent incentives and structures to change the very culture of how teachers are supported. A new paradigm is needed to construct a consistent vision of quality teaching—one that is anchored in a system of performance assessments and leveraged through the design of clinically based preservice programs, comprehensive induction, and collaborative professional learning.

The future of the American economy increasingly depends on more students graduating from high school ready for college and a career. Long-standing trends in the nation’s dropout rate and achievement gap demonstrate that the American education system needs to better prepare students to meet postsecondary and career demands. While momentum is building to expand learning time for students to help meet these challenges, most efforts have been focused on elementary and middle school students. This brief will explore how expanding the learning opportunities of high school students—to provide flexibility regarding time, location, and delivery methods as well as opportunities to apply knowledge in real-world situations and access social and academic supports—can be used to change the projected skill and knowledge shortages in the nation’s workforce.

Technology and digital learning provide innovative opportunities to improve education, personalize learning for each student, and have better student achievement. This brief highlights the promising practices that some schools are employing to transform student learning and the federal policies that can assist schools in making that transformation. The promising practices shared in this brief point to several key areas in which technology and digital learning can make a difference for teachers and students. They include examples that illustrate how some states, districts, and schools are maximizing the potential of technology and digital learning to change student outcomes. The federal policies emphasize that the federal government has the opportunity to assist states, school districts, and public schools by creating policies that encourage innovation and provide options for digital learning and technology.

New assessments that measure deeper learning—whether students understand challenging content and are able to apply that knowledge to think critically, solve problems, communicate their understanding, and work with their peers—are essential if students are to develop the competencies they need to succeed in an increasingly complex world. Such assessments would not only measure whether students have developed those competencies, they would also foster deeper learning in the classroom, because of the influence of assessment on instruction. This brief shows what assessments that measure deeper learning would look like, how they are used in other countries, how technology can support their development, and how they can be implemented feasibly.

This paper summarizes the ways in which high schools are overlooked within Title I policy. Specific examples are provided in order to illustrate and explain the complexities of Title I policy, and recommendations for the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act are provided in order to strengthen support of high schools through Title I.

Authored by Wayne Riddle, a veteran of the Congressional Research Service and one of the nation's foremost experts on Title I, this paper explains in detail the process in which states, districts, and schools receive Title I funding, and discusses the low level of support that high schools receive from Title I. New data in this report includes a state-by-state analysis of the number of high-poverty high schools that are not eligible for Title I. Additionally, recommendations for the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act are provided in order to strengthen support of high schools through Title I.

The call to action to address the nation’s dropout crisis has bubbled up to the federal level, where policymakers are dedicating funding and offering solutions to improve graduation rates, including proposals to be part of the pending reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Much of this attention is rightly focused on the 2,000 high schools with the lowest graduation rates, which together account for more than half of the nation’s dropouts. However, research and emerging practice across the country indicate that this school-centric strategy must be complemented with one that addresses the specific educational needs of those students most likely to drop out of school—off-track students—in an effort to prevent them from dropping out. In doing so, federal policymakers should draw on research and best practice in this area, particularly efforts in leading districts such as New York City, whose Multiple Pathways to Graduation (MPG) initiative has attracted national attention for its innovative approach, the size and scale of the effort, and early indicators of success. This brief examines the landscape of the federal role in addressing the nation’s off-track student population and explores ways that federal policy can be strengthened to better serve these students. It concludes with a look at the New York City experience as a case study of such work, drawing out relevant lessons learned that can provide valuable context for the federal conversation.

Every student deserves an education that prepares them for success beyond high school. This moral imperative to ensure strong educational outcomes for all students has been the clarion call of education reformers for decades. But in a time of fiscal uncertainty and shrinking budgets, the economic necessity to improve graduation rates is emerging as an additional key motivator. Years of research underscore the many links between education and the economy and the Alliance builds upon this research to project specific economic benefits that the nation, states, and local areas could see as a result of increasing graduation rates. These figures can be used as concrete examples for policymakers and stakeholders at all levels to underscore the economic imperative of addressing the dropout crisis.