Although a growing body of research points to the critical need to foster reading, writing, speaking, and critical thinking skills for students in order to ensure their success in college, careers, and life, these efforts have tended to focus more on developing literacy skills in the early years, often ignoring secondary students. The outcome has been undeniable: While the literacy skills of students in the primary grades have improved, achievement for middle and secondary students has remained virtually unchanged. The Striving Readers program is the main federal effort aimed at reversing these trends at the secondary school level. After the first year of implementation, the Alliance for Excellent Education convened representatives of seven of the Striving Readers projects. This policy brief takes a look their experiences as well as other research and strategies that have been successful in the field in order to assist in shaping the next phase of the federal effort in adolescent literacy. Recommendations are made for both program and policy in an attempt to promote a more cohesive and comprehensive adolescent literacy effort for secondary students.

To prepare students for success in life, the twenty-first-century American high school needs to shift its focus from preparing for college or career to achieving college and career readiness for every student. One of the most comprehensive efforts towards this goal is the “multiple pathways” initiative in California, which is a reform model aimed at improving high schools by pairing a rigorous college preparatory curriculum with an industry theme while offering the supports and workplace exposure that can be critical to students’ success. The initiative provides multiyear programs of study that are rigorous, relevant, and directly connected to regional and state economic needs. This brief details the multiple pathways movement in California, developed in response to poor and inequitable student outcomes, as it continues to garner interest and develop a growing base of evidence. The discussion lays out the rationale for the approach and the implications of this California-based effort for stakeholders seeking to address the national dropout crisis.

As education stakeholders look ahead to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) reauthorization, there is near-universal consensus that the current federal accountability and school improvement systems need to be reinvented, infused with more and better data, and tailored to meet the individual needs of schools and students. Now, educators, policymakers, and the public are eager for indicators that both better reflect the national goal of graduating all students ready for college and careers and help educators plan and implement strategies for getting them there. Fortunately, a number of high school performance indicators have emerged as being predictive of high school graduation and college and career readiness. These factors include attendance, course success, on-track-to-graduation status, course-taking patterns, success on college- and career-ready assessments, postsecondary success rates, and school climate. This brief, Moving Beyond AYP: High School Performance Indicators, describes the research behind these indicators, measurement options and challenges, and current use across the nation. It also  offers recommendations to federal policymakers for supporting the use of multiple, actionable high school performance indicators.

In an age where a postsecondary education, let alone a high school diploma, is increasingly necessary to succeed in the global economy, the growing recognition of a graduation crisis that disproportionately affects poor and minority students has helped galvanize the demand to improve the lowest-performing high schools. Education leaders have a responsibility to provide better options to the students served by such high schools. Addressing the nation’s lowest-performing high schools with effective options for all students—either by transforming them, closing them, or replacing them with multiple other schools—will require a systemic strategy that involves stakeholders and policymakers at all levels, establishes the necessary conditions for success, and  promotes organizational practices and instructional strategies within a school that lead to improved  teaching, learning, and outcomes. This brief examines the current federal approach to addressing the lowest-performing high schools; explores lessons learned from emerging strategies at the state and local level; and provides related recommendations for federal policy.

To future generations, Americans’ current educational myopia is likely to appear, at best, a negligent failure to anticipate and meet the needs of the nation and its citizens. And for the sake of those future generations, the short-sighted practices and parochial policies that have delayed significant improve-ment in the nation’s educational advancement must change. To provide students with a world-class education, the United States, beginning with strong leadership from the U.S. Department of Education (ED), must adopt a more global outlook. The tools and opportunities already exist; indeed, the United States has even subsidized their creation. Now the nation needs to participate in, learn from, and act on the results of internationally benchmarked assessments.

As the poor performance of U.S. high schools has been acknowledged and come to the forefront of education policy debates over the past several years, so too has a recognition of the need to improve graduation rate calculations and accountability for increasing those rates. A range of state, national, and federal efforts have been launched toward this end—many of which were codified in the October 2008 federal regulations on Title I of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). This brief, Every Student Counts: The Role of Federal Policy in Improving Graduation Rate Accountability, provides background information on the movement toward better data collection, common graduation rate calculations, and meaningful accountability for raising graduation rates and describes in detail the culminating federal policy changes made by the regulations, which reflect both the significant progress that has been made and the hurdles that remain.

For too long, inaccurate data, misleading official graduation and dropout calculations, and inadequate accountability systems at the state and federal levels have obscured low graduation rates. In October 2008, the U.S. Department of Education (ED) released regulations that change requirements for states’ calculations, reporting, and accountability systems for graduation rates under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). Nationally, and for each state, Federal High School Graduation Rate Policies and the Impact on States summarizes the changes the new regulations would make in these three policy areas and describes how each state's current graduation rate policies might be affected.

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.

If the nation is to truly meet the goal of every child a graduate, we must hold schools responsible for graduating every student with a regular diploma, particularly poor and minority students. Unfortunately, current education accountability systems virtually ignore high school graduation rates. Every Student Counts: The Case for Graduation Rate Accountability summarizes such shortcomings in the No Child Left Behind Act and calls on policymakers to take action on four specific recommendations that will alleviate the unintended consequences of weak graduation rate accountability.

If all of the U.S. high school dropouts from the Class of 2008 had instead earned diplomas along with their classmates, the U.S. economy could have benefited from an additional $319 billion in wages over these students’ lifetimes. So say conservative calculations made by the Alliance for Excellent Education that were published in The High Cost of High School Dropouts: What the Nation Pays for Inadequate High Schools.