The Common Core State Standards spell out the sophisticated language competencies that students will need to perform in academic and technical subject areas. English language learners (ELLs) face a double challenge—they must learn grade-level content while simultaneously building their language proficiency. This policy brief discusses these challenges, highlights initiatives and strategies to advance  ELLs' language and content learning, and outlines how policy and practice must change to help ELLs graduate ready for college and a career.

In the summer of 2012, the National Association of State Directors of Career Technical Education Consortium (NASDCTEc) and the Alliance for Excellent Education conducted a survey of State Directors of Career Technical Education (CTE) to gauge state efforts to better connect CTE with a larger college- and career-readiness agenda. Survey questions spanned a range of issues, including whether each state had developed a definition of career readiness, the number of career academies in each state, and what states are doing to formally identify and remove barriers to work-based learning opportunities in policy and practice. This brief includes a short description of efforts from two states—Connecticut and Kentucky—to define work-based learning opportunities for youth participants, educators, and employers, and to create policies that provide greater access to these opportunities.

The nation’s economy is only as strong as the educational foundation that supports it. Economic success in the twenty-first century requires a labor force capable of demonstrating an advanced level of both knowledge and skill. To be a true engine of growth, the nation’s education system must be aligned with these demands. This is why the reauthorization of the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Educational Improvement Act of 2006 (Perkins), the nation’s largest federal investment in secondary and postsecondary career and technical education (CTE), is both critical and timely. As a result of the previous reauthorization, a greater emphasis was placed on improving the academic achievement of CTE students, program accountability, and the link between secondary and postsecondary education. The next reauthorization of Perkins must continue to build on these changes, ensuring that the opportunities provided at the secondary school level are relevant, engaging, of high quality, and aligned with the career demands that lie ahead, and that such opportunities place a targeted focus on those youth who have traditionally been least likely to have access to the educational opportunities that prepare them to be both college and career ready.

The eleven state applications approved by the federal government for waivers under the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act vary in the degree to which “deeper learning” skills are reflected in the standards, accountability systems, professional development, and teacher evaluations, according to a new policy brief written by the Alliance for Excellent Education. The brief argues that deeper learning provides students with the deep content knowledge they need to succeed after high school and the skills that today’s jobs demand. To ensure that deeper learning competencies are better reflected in state plans, the brief offers recommendations to policymakers

Literacy is one of the most critical components of academic success, but the majority of students are leaving high school without the reading and writing skills needed to succeed in college and a career. According to ACT, fewer than 40 percent of black and Latino students are ready for college-level reading when they graduate from high school. This policy brief describes two state-led initiatives—the English language arts common core state standards, and comprehensive birth-through-grade-twelve state literacy plans—to help all young people attain the advanced literacy skills needed to succeed in the modern world. It concludes with a set of policy recommendations to invest fully in efforts to catalyze nationwide improvements in literacy achievement.

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.