Over the past two decades or so, a majority of states have implemented policies that link teenagers' driver's licenses to school attendance, academic performance, or behavior, but those requirements are not backed by solid research evidence. Experts trace the start of the trend to 1988, when West Virginia enacted a law linking driving privileges…

Across the country, high school graduation rates are bemoaned with regularity. Many states and districts aren't even tracking the rate for the fastest-growing population of students, or if they are, they aren't telling the public how many English-language learners (ELLs) are leaving school with a diploma. The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act was…

The closing of hundreds of U.S. schools in recent weeks because of concerns about swine flu underscores the need for administrators to make plans for continuing their students' education during any extended shutdown, emergency experts and federal officials say. Fears about a severe flu pandemic had eased as of late last week, but experts say…

President Barack Obama's call for every state to require school attendance until age 18 may spark a flurry of action in some statehouses, but changing attendance laws will do little by itself to drive down the nation's dropout rates, experts on the issue say. In his State of the Union address last month, President Obama said states should require…

In the midst of an attempt by Arizona's legislature and top education official to shut down ethnic-studies courses in the Tucson Unified School District, students at Tucson High Magnet School are flocking to the courses this school year. School district officials say enrollment in Mexican-American studies in Tucson Unified's 14 high schools has…

"Response to intervention" (RTI) as a model for boosting student achievement has taken off like wildfire. When it comes to research on how best to implement the process for students in middle and high school, though, the flame abruptly fizzles out. There's little RTI research that is specific to secondary schools, although it has been…

Elementary school students have a stronger grasp of U.S. history, and what it means to be a knowledgeable citizen, than they did a few years ago, new test results suggest. Part of the reason they are better informed about history and citizenship, some argue, is that they are better readers. That was the view put forward by U.S. Secretary of…

President Bush's new plan to heighten the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act's focus on high schools is being questioned by policy makers. This article discusses how the Bush administration, with its proposals to reauthorize the current version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the NCLB, wants to use the law to change the way high…

This article reports the concerns in using college-entrance tests for school accountability. A growing number of states are requiring high school students to take college-admission tests and even making the exams a core part of their own testing systems. Proponents argue that having all teenagers take the exams will encourage more young people to…

A new Georgia program aims to give every high school a full-time educator dedicated to dropout prevention. This program is part of Georgia's highly visible new attempt to increase the state's graduation rate. Rather than giving school counselors or administrators one more task, Gov. Sonny Perdue's goal for the program, which was approved by the…

When educators from across the country, and even other nations, are looking for ideas on how to blend career and technical training with demanding academics, their search often takes them to this rural pocket of southern Delaware, the home of Sussex Technical High School. Fifteen years after overhauling its mission, this school framed by fields…

This article discusses a White House proposal that would bring math, science, and engineering professionals into public high schools to teach those subjects, thereby bypassing the "highly qualified" teacher mandate under the No Child Left Behind Act. Education observers consider this merely a temporary solution to easing the shortfall of…

This article reports on the central recommendation of the federal task force for a way to better handle dropout and graduation rates. Made up of 10 academics and government statisticians, the panel comprising the Task Force on Graduation, Completion, and Dropout Indicators was formed in the fall of 2003 to advise the U.S. Department of Education's…

States and districts are going to get more breathing room to meet the federal mandate that teachers be "highly qualified," but extending the deadline, teacher-quality advocates say, could ultimately bring more pressure on school officials to make progress. That's because the one-year reprieve dangled in late October 2005 by federal…

Despite all its efforts to crack down on the bomb scares that disrupted classes again and again in 2003, North Carolina's Orange County district fell victim to yet another false alarm this school year, 2004. For some schools, bomb threats have become more routine than fire drills, with each incident ringing up multi-thousand-dollar tabs for…