The federal role in education will soon be transformed in ways that could produce an even greater society than President Lyndon B. Johnson envisioned. The authors identify underlying principles of this new role and describe how it represents a significant departure from the past. Historically, for example, the federal government has been…

The U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) has measured various types of high school graduation, completion, and dropout rates for decades. In 2006, NCES was directed by senior managers in the Education Department to reduce use of its standard graduation and completion rate measures and instead promote the…

The issue of high school dropouts in America is both serious and important. Statistics, socioeconomic factors that most dropouts may face, preventative methods, and alternative forms of education that can help students still receive an education will be discussed. Dropping out of high school can lead a student to a more likely future of hardships…

The richest nation of the world, the United States still struggles to graduate 50% of its Latina/o high school students. Nominal policy attention on this issue begs the need for bolder and more creative initiatives that call attention to this crisis. States, districts, and schools need to reconfigure this pedagogical crisis by leveraging all…

The author looks at critical dialogue surrounding the causes for the alarming high numbers of high school dropouts in states that use high stakes standardized testing mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act, and investigates the perceived correlations between high stakes testing and high numbers of high school dropouts of minority students.

As a superintendent of the Bellevue School District, the author discusses the Bellevue School District's curriculum and its ongoing development. The mission of the Bellevue School District is to give every student the kind of education traditionally reserved for America's elite class or, stated another way, to give every student a first-rate,…

This opinion piece is drawn from experiences working with Texas educators and students, whose lives are now being more and more colored and shaped by an accountability system that is fast becoming the end rather than the means to better teaching and learning. [This document originally appeared in the "IDRA Newsletter", however some accompanying…

Recent studies have argued that there is a dropout crisis in the U.S. But the authors in this article, find that this contention is based on flawed analyses of inadequate data. Using a much wider range of sources, they conclude that the situation is not nearly so dire as is commonly believed. (Contains 14 endnotes.)

Every day, an estimated 2,500 students across the nation drop out of high school. In the last decade, approximately 30 percent of students who enrolled in high school have failed to graduate four years later. The situation is even more dismal for youth of color. In 2003, only 55 percent of African Americans and 53 percent of Hispanics graduated…

This paper is organized around three central questions: (1) What should be the primary goals of high school reform and what is the critical set of outcomes that matter for students? (2)Shat do we know about the strategies schools could use to pursue those goals? and (3) What are the implications of these strategies for the development of high…

A recent study of ninth- and tenth-grade dropouts in North Carolina shows that Hispanic adolescents have the highest early dropout rate among the state's largest ethnic groups. This relationship persists when boys and girls are analyzed separately: Hispanic boys are more likely to drop out early than other boys are, and Hispanic girls are more…