TIME TO "LEARN": Comprehensive Literacy Bill Introduced in Congress: On November 5, U.S. Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) introduced the Literacy Education for All, Results for the Nation (LEARN) Act, a comprehensive literacy bill that would authorize $2.35 billion to support state and local programs to ensure that children from birth through grade twelve have the reading and writing skills necessary for success in school and beyond. The following day, U.S. Representatives John Yarmuth (D-KY) and Jared Polis (D-CO) introduced a companion bill in the U.S. House of Representatives.

TEACHING FOR A NEW WORLD: New Alliance Brief Offers a New Vision for High School Teacher Preparation: Despite pockets of excellence across the country, there are far too few teacher preparation programs that provide high school teachers with the skills they need to educate all students to be college and career ready, according to a new policy brief from the Alliance for Excellent Education, funded by MetLife Foundation. The brief, Teaching for a New World: Preparing High School Educators to Deliver College- and Career-Ready Instruction, offers a new vision for secondary school teacher preparation and outlines how federal policy can support it.

NEW NCES REPORT MAPS STATE PROFICIENCY ONTO NAEP SCALES: Report Finds Wide Variation Among States in the Rigor of Their Standards: A new report from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) finds that many states set standards for proficiency that fall below the basic standard on the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP). According to the report, Mapping State Proficiency Standards Onto NAEP Scales: 2005-2007, thirty-one states set fourth-grade standards for proficiency that were lower than the cut point for basic on NAEP. The same was true for fifteen states on eighth-grade reading tests. In math, seven states fall into this category for fourth-grade tests while eight do so for eighth grade.

ACHIEVING GRADUATION FOR ALL: A New Report Offers Governors a Plan of Action to Tackle the High School Dropout Crisis: A new report from the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) calls on the nation's governors to take action to address the high school dropout crisis. Achieving Graduation for All: A Governor's Guide to Dropout Prevention and Recovery prescribes four specific strategies for governors to confront the dropout challenge and enact effective solutions to raise the graduation rate.

INFORMING ADOLESCENT LITERACY POLICY AND PRACTICE: Alliance Brief Offers Lessons Learned from Federal Efforts to Improve Literacy Skills of Middle and High School Students: To assist the new Striving Readers grantees, as well as to inform policymakers looking to expand federal efforts to improve reading and comprehension among middle and high school students, the Alliance for Excellent Education has released a new policy brief that highlights lessons learned from the experiences of previous Striving Readers grantees.

THE CONSEQUENCES OF DROPPING OUT OF HIGH SCHOOL: Average High School Dropout Has a Negative Net Fiscal Contribution to Society of $5,200, Says New Report: A new report from the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University finds that young adult high school dropouts-individuals aged sixteen to twenty-four-face great difficulty in the labor market. The report, The Consequences of Dropping Out of High School: Joblessness and Jailing for High School Dropouts and the High Cost for Taxpayers, also examines other problems such as lower earnings and higher incarceration rates that affect young adult dropouts more disproportionately than their better-educated peers.

AVERAGED FRESHMAN GRADUATION RATE: U.S. Department of Education Reports 73.9 Percent Graduation Rate for 2006-07 School Year: In a report released earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Education estimates that 73.9 percent of public high school students received a diploma in the 2006-07 school year. These statistics are calculated according to the Averaged Freshman Graduation Rate (AFGR), which uses three years of student enrollment data to estimate percent of students receiving a regular diploma within four years.

THE NEXT GENERATION OF SCHOOL ACCOUNTABILITY: New Report Examines How to Improve Graduation Rates and Student Achievement Levels in SREB States: Although high school graduation rates have significantly improved across the sixteen Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) states since 2000, there is still much work to be done. That is the message from a recent SREB report entitled The Next Generation of School Accountability: A Blueprint for Raising High School Achievement and Graduation Rates in SREB States. The study calls on state leaders to take part in the solutions phase of improving student achievement in high school and beyond.