A new study by the Alliance for Excellent Education estimates that if Portland-area schools were able to cut their dropout rates in half, the injection of an additional 3,450 high school graduates into the local economy would generate 350 jobs, create $40 million in additional yearly earnings for those young people and generate $3.7 million a year in taxes to support state programs.

The United States would save between $7.9 and $10.8 billion annually by improving education attainment among all recipients of Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, food stamps and housing assistance. -A high school dropout contributes about $60,000 less in taxes over a lifetime. -If the male graduation rate were increased by only 5 percent, the nation would see an annual savings of $4.9 billion in crime-related costs. SOURCES: The United States Census; Illinois Community College Board; The Alliance for Excellent Education

Mirroring several of its neighbors in northwest Montana, Flathead County has one of the highest yearly dropout rates in the state. According to the Montana Office of Public Instruction, 6.2 percent of high school students in the county dropped out during the 2007-2008 school year...The Alliance for Excellent Education estimates that dropouts from the class of 2008 will cost Montana almost $830 million in lost wages over their lifetimes.

This was supposed to be the year that Congress finally completed the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, a task which has been lingering since 2007. But the wait may go on. Although the legislative machinery seems to be clanking along, with an Obama administration blueprint for renewal on the table and House and Senate education panels holding hearings on a variety of issues related to the law, the political prospects for the renewal are much more dicey.

In the blueprint for overhauling federal education policy that President Obama sent to Congress on Monday, his administration seeks to confront some of the major educational challenges that have developed during the eight years that President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law has been a powerful influence on the nation’s public schools.

Coming to a high school graduation near you: President Barack Obama. The White House and the Education Department are giving public high schools the opportunity to compete to have the president speak at their commencement ceremony this spring. The winning school must demonstrate how it's helping prepare students to meet Obama's goal of the U.S. having the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020.

President Barack Obama will urge states to better prepare high school students for college and careers when he meets Monday with the nation's governors. In remarks released Sunday by the White House, Obama praises governors for working in tandem with his Race to the Top program to reward school systems that raise standards and prove that through tougher student assessments.

Senior House Republicans and Democrats plan to announce Thursday that they will team up to rewrite the No Child Left Behind education law, a rare show of bipartisanship in the polarized Congress. Last month, the Obama administration launched talks with lawmakers on an overhaul of the 2002 law, which mandated an expansion of standardized testing and established a national framework for school accountability.

The Obama administration is proposing a sweeping overhaul of President Bush’s signature education law, No Child Left Behind, and will call for broad changes in how schools are judged to be succeeding or failing, as well as for the elimination of the law’s 2014 deadline for bringing every American child to academic proficiency.

A little-noticed but unusually detailed study of teaching practices, reported by Robert Rothman in the November/December issue of the Harvard Education Letter, delivers a depressing message you should keep in mind whenever you read anything about raising school achievement. I don’t care if it’s by an education school dean, or a state governor, or the U.S. secretary of education, or even me. If this new study is true then none of us really knows what we are talking about.