This interactive video profile of the Quakertown Community School District (QCSD) is the first of a series providing readers with a real-life, practical story about how district and school leaders are working to improve student learning outcomes through the effective use of digital learning. It examines how QCSD—a small, K–12 public school district in rural southeastern Pennsylvania—worked with important partners, including its local teachers’ union, to improve student outcomes using effective applications of technology and blended learning strategies. Throughout the interactive profile, there are short videos from district practitioners describing how they addressed specific issues.

Prior to 2008, many states used inaccurate high school graduation rate calculations. In 2008, the U.S. Department of Education (ED) issued regulations to address this concern, which were scheduled to become fully operational in every state in the 2011–12 school year. ED’s flexibility policy (i.e., waivers from key provisions within the No Child Left Behind Act [NCLB]) provides an opportunity for states to implement innovative policies and practices designed to improve student achievement and graduation rates. This report provides an extensive analysis by the Alliance for Excellent Education, which shows that recent progress in holding high schools accountable for how many students they graduate—the ultimate goal of K–12 education—may be slowed in some states based on waivers recently granted under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), currently known as NCLB. The report also includes a review of approved waiver plans submitted by thirty-four states and the District of Columbia.

For a century, most students have advanced from grade to grade based on the number of days they spend in class, but in New Hampshire, schools have moved away from “seat time” and toward “competency-based learning,” which advances students when they have mastered course content. This report profiles how two high schools in New Hampshire made this shift and examines the changes that were necessary to make competency-based advancement an important part of New Hampshire’s strategy for implementing the Common Core State Standards and ensuring that students graduate ready for college and a career.

The federal student financial aid system, originally designed to increase access to higher education, must undergo a transformation to help more students earn a higher education degree or certificate and meet the increased demands of the twenty-first-century economy. This report outlines a comprehensive approach for revamping the student aid system into one that better supports students and institutions of higher education 
and focuses on access and completion.

This report outlines serious problems with the current federal student financial aid system and calls on policymakers to simplify both the process and the programs and shift the system’s emphasis from simply access to providing the overall support resulting in postsecondary completion. It provides a brief overview of legislative changes that have altered the structure and focus of the system and turned them into a complicated web of Pell Grants, federal student loans, tuition tax credits, and campus-based aid programs that is unnecessarily convoluted and daunting for parents and students to navigate.

As students of color and diverse ethnicities rapidly become the leading population of public school systems in numerous states, closing educational achievement gaps and providing a quality education to all students can secure the United State’s future economic prosperity. Noting that two-thirds of the U.S. economy is driven by consumer spending, this report argues that raising individuals’ education levels will boost their purchasing power and increase the national economy.

While the U.S. Congress must confront crucial economic issues this month, every school, district, and state leader must make critical decisions in the next two years involving digital learning that will shape education for decades. This report identifies four key challenges that public school district leaders must systemically address in the next two years and outlines the essential elements for developing a comprehensive digital strategy.

Preparing all students to succeed in today’s increasingly global economy and complex world requires a shift from a teacher-centric culture to learner-centered instruction, according to a new report from the Alliance for Excellent Education. This report examines the characteristics of learner-centered instruction and the support that educators and schools will require to make such an approach work. It argues that a learner-centered approach will not succeed without a cultural shift throughout the education system that includes maximizing the potential of digital learning to meet students’ needs.

This report outlines how digital learning can connect middle and high school students with better teaching and learning experiences while also addressing three major challenges facing the nation’s education system—access to good teaching, tight budgets, and boosting student achievement. But simply slapping a netbook on top of a textbook will not lead to improvements. Effective educational technology strategies must link the “Three Ts”—teaching, technology, and use of time—with overall whole-school reform strategies and proven pedagogical practices to accelerate the pace of improvement and ensure that all students benefit from the opportunity that digital learning offers.

Although some progress has been made in improving the writing achievement of students in American schools, most students do not write well enough to meet grade-level demands. One tool with potential for improving students’ ability to effectively convey thoughts and ideas through text is classroom-based writing assessment. Such formative assessments allow teachers to gauge the effectiveness of their instructional practices, modify instruction as needed, and provide students with feedback on writing strengths and areas in need of further development. This report provides evidence that formative writing enhances students’ writing, as well as best practices for assessing writing in the classroom.

With advances in research, technology, and assessments, and with a focused effort, the U.S. education system can lead the world in becoming a data-driven enterprise. This publication provides leaders from business, philanthropy, and education with background on data issues; describes challenges that must be overcome; and makes recommendations for moving forward.

The issue of teacher effectiveness has risen rapidly to the top of the education policy agenda, and the federal government and states are considering bold steps to improve teacher and leader effectiveness. One place to look for ideas is the experiences of high-performing education systems around the world. Finland, Ontario, and Singapore all have well-developed systems for recruiting, preparing, developing, and retaining teachers and school leaders, and all have attained high levels of student performance and attribute their success to their teacher-effectiveness policies. This report examines lessons from these high-performing systems that the United States can apply, and provides detailed descriptions of the policies from each system.

The 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results were released by the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) on December 7 in Paris, France. PISA is one of the few mechanisms for regularly and directly comparing the quality of educational outcomes in the seventy countries that make up almost 90 percent of the world's economy. PISA measures the capacity of fifteen-year-old students to apply what they have learned in the classroom in order to analyze, reason, and communicate effectively.

On December 1, 2010, Jeb Bush, governor of Florida 1999-2007, and Bob Wise, governor of West Virginia 2001-2005, released the "10 Elements of High-Quality Digital Learning." The ten elements represent the recommendations of the Digital Learning Council (DLC), a diverse group of more than one hundred leaders in education, government, philanthropy, business, technology and policy, and is meant to serve as a roadmap of reform for local, state, and federal officials to advance digital learning. On December 2, 2010, the Alliance for Excellent Education hosted a live webinar to talk about the release of the "10 Elements." Gov. Wise was joined by Lisa Gillis of DLC and Susan Patrick of iNACOL to discuss why digital learning can improve student learning and how it can help transform the education system. Following the discussion was an interactive conversation using questions submitted by participants from the around the country. The DLC is cochaired by Gov. Bush, chief executive officer of the Foundation for Excellence in Education, and Gov. Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education.

Improving the quality of public high schools through the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) is a voting issue for over eight in ten voters, according to a new national poll released July 14, 2010 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. The poll was conducted by Lake Research Partners and Bellwether Research and Consulting for the purpose of gaining insight into Americans' views of the public education system, the concern over the growing problems with the nation’s high schools, and the urgency to enact meaningful education reform through reauthorization of ESEA.

Although some progress has been made in improving the literacy achievement of students in American high schools during the last twenty years, the majority of students still do not read or write well enough to meet grade-level demands. Poor literacy skills play a role in why many of these students do not complete high school. Among those who do graduate, many will not be ready for college or a career where reading and writing are required. These young people will find themselves at a serious disadvantage in successfully pursuing some form of higher education, securing a job that pays a living wage, or participating in social and civic activities. One often-overlooked tool for improving students’ reading, as well as their learning from text, is writing. This report identifies instructional practices in writing shown to improve students’ reading abilities and recommends ways that teachers can improve students’ reading skills through teaching writing.

While the federal government and the states have implemented some promising education reform efforts in 2010, these efforts will have limited long-term impact and risk undermining accountability if they continue to be pursued without updating and improving the bedrock of federal education policy-the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA, the current version of which is known as the No Child Left Behind Act, or NCLB). Only an ESEA reauthorization can address the aspects of NCLB that time, experience, and research have shown need to be significantly improved or updated. This report from the Alliance for Excellent Education and the Aspen Institute's Commission on No Child Left Behind, Don't Leave Accountability Behind: A Call for ESEA Reauthorization, describes four distinct reasons ESEA reauthorization is necessary to support long-term reform and ensure strong accountability for student outcomes and improvement.

On February 5, the Alliance released Current Challenges and Opportunities in Preparing Rural High School Students for Success in College and Careers, a new report that is intended to give federal policymakers a detailed understanding of the challenges facing rural high schools as well as the inherent assets that rural schools bring to the national education reform debate.

The report notes that current federal education policies and research tend to favor urban and suburban high schools with the largest student populations and pay too little attention to the unique needs and circumstances of rural high schools. As a result, high schools-and high school students-in too many rural communities are in trouble.

Relatively small improvements in students’ educational performance can have large impacts on a nation’s future economic well-being, according to The High Cost of Low Educational Performance: The Long-Run Economic Impact of Improving PISA Outcomes. PISA, the Program for International Student Assessment, was created by the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) in1997 to monitor the outcomes of education systems in terms of student achievement on a regular basis and within an internationally greed-common framework. This PISA report, presented on January 28 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, uses economic modeling to relate cognitive skills (as measured by PISA) to economic growth. The report shows that achievable gains in educational performance yield tens of trillions of dollars in gains in a nation’s gross domestic product.

Few people realize the impact that high school dropouts have on a community’s economic, social, and civic health. Business owners and residents—in particular, those without school-aged children—may not be aware that they have much at stake in the success of their local high schools. Indeed, everyone—from car dealers and realtors to bank managers and local business owners—benefits when more students graduate from high school. To better understand the various economic benefits that a particular community could expect if it were to reduce its number of high school dropouts, the Alliance, with the generous support of State Farm®, analyzed the local economies of the nation’s fifty largest cities and their surrounding areas to calculate economic projections that estimate the gross increase in important local economic factors such as individual earnings, home and auto sales, job and economic growth, spending and investment, tax revenue, and human capital.

As the nation embraces the goal of graduating all students college and career ready, there is a growing movement to realign standards, assessments, and accountability systems to that goal. Meaningful Measurement: The Role of Assessments in Improving High School Education in the Twenty-First Century, is a collection of essays by leading experts that discuss important assessment issues, examines promising assessment practices from across the globe, and offers recommendations on how the federal government can support an assessment agenda for the twenty-first century. Topics include: assessments that measure students’ college and career readiness, performance assessments, the role of benchmark assessments, assessing high school students who are English Language learners and students with disabilities, the benefits of international assessments, the role of technology in improving assessments and their use, and how assessment design affects the implementation of a growth model at the high school level.

Full Report

Introduction and Chapters

Press Release

April 14, 2009 Event

This report outlines the Alliance for Excellent Education’s Framework for Action to Improve Secondary Schools, which reflects the consensus among educators, researchers, policymakers, and other authorities on the specific problems of secondary schools, as well as on the research- and best-practice-supported solutions to those problems. Taken together, the seven policy areas contained within the framework offer a comprehensive and systemic approach to secondary school reform.

The United States can no longer absorb the costs and losses associated with an education system that produces more than 1.2 million dropouts every year. This report examines the impact of this crisis on the dropouts themselves, as well as its effect on the economy, social fabric, and security of the nation, states, and local communities.

Today, more than six million of the nation’s secondary school students fall well short of grade-level expectations in reading and writing. Recognizing the urgency of this literacy crisis among middle and high school students, policymakers in all parts of the country have begun to implement a wide range of new programs and services designed to help struggling adolescent readers catch up in essential literacy skills, particularly reading fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. However—and as this report argues—if students are to be truly prepared for the sophisticated intellectual demands of college, work, and citizenship, then these reforms will not be enough. Even as their schools help them to catch up in the basics, students also must be taught the advanced literacy skills that will enable them to succeed in the academic content areas—particularly the core content areas of math, science, English, and history.

Over the past several years, education leaders and policymakers have come to understand that the nation needs to dramatically improve the literacy levels of its adolescents. But the policy discussion has focused, in large part, on the literacy needs of native English speaking students – to date, much less attention has gone to the specific challenges involved in teaching reading and writing to adolescents for whom English is not a first language. Commissioned by Carnegie Corporation of New York, written by Deborah Short and Shannon Fitzsimmons of the Center for Applied Linguistics, and published by the Alliance for Excellent Education, this report makes a powerful case for particular teaching practices and educational policies designed to help English language learners master the reading and writing skills they need to succeed in high school, college, and the workforce.