The Alliance for Excellent Education recently released a report explaining the relationship between realistic graduation rate reporting and effective high school reform efforts. The report explains the reasons why so many different graduation rate formulas and statistics exist, addresses why states report them differently, and discusses the limitations and benefits of each method. The report also defines the policy changes needed to assure that educators, school officials, parents, and the public receive timely and accurate information about how many students are actually graduating so that they can assess their schools’ current effectiveness and make improvements.

The report explains the role that graduation rates play in holding schools, districts, and states accountable (including their role in meeting No Child Left Behind Act requirements) and gives a detailed chronology of reform initiatives. Some of the policy recommendations include:

• States should calculate comparable, accurate, disaggregated graduation rates and use those rates for NCLB reporting and accountability.
• States and the federal government should invest in well-designed statewide longitudinal data systems to track individual students over time.
• States should implement the National Governors Association’s Graduation Rate Compact, signed by all 50 governors in 2005.
• The U.S. Department of Education should require schools to report the number of diploma recipients; the number of 9th-grade repeaters; and the number of 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th graders who have been verified as transferring in and out. These simple steps would allow anyone to estimate graduation rates for any high school in the nation.
• NCLB reauthorization should ensure the reporting and use of accurate, disaggregated graduation rate data as a key component of high school accountability, including meaningful annual and ultimate goals for improving graduation rates and appropriate and funded improvement actions for schools in need of improvement.
• Education policymakers at every level should act to improve graduation rates through comprehensive high school reform.

Read more here.

Source: Alliance for Excellent Education [June 27, 2006]

NEW REPORT: DIPLOMAS COUNT

Education Week has released a new report entitled Diplomas Count: An Essential Guide to Graduation Policy and Rates. The report provides detailed data on graduation rates for the 2002-03 school year, the most recent data available, for all 50 states and the District of Columbia, and in the nation's 50 largest school districts. The analysis is based on the Cumulative Promotion Index developed by Christopher B. Swanson, the director of the Editorial Projects in Education (EPE) Research Center and a prominent expert on graduation data. Additionally, the EPE Research Center has created a new online mapping service that allows users to zoom in on each of the nation's individual school districts and create a special report for that district, including comparisons with state and national figures. Some of the reports findings include:

• Graduation rates vary widely across the nation's largest districts, from a high of 82.5 percent in Fairfax County, Va., the nation's 14th largest district, to a low of 21.7 percent in the Detroit Public Schools, the nation’s 11th largest district.
• On average, 60 percent of all students in urban districts graduate from high school, a rate 10 percentage points lower than the national average and nearly 15 percentage points lower than the suburban average.
• Districts where most students are members of racial or ethnic minorities have graduation rates almost 20 percentage points lower than majority-white districts. School systems with high levels of racial segregation also have much lower graduation rates (56.2 percent) than those with low levels of racial segregation (75.1 percent).

Read more here.

Source: Edweek.org [June 2006]

TRANSFER AND RETENTION OF URBAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE STUDENTS (TRUCCS) PROJECT

Initially based on a grant funded by the U.S. Department of Education, and currently funded by the Lumina Foundation, TRUCCS is a major initiative to understand urban community college students. The project, led by the University of Southern California (USC), is a collaborative effort with the Los Angeles Community College District (LACCD). TRUCCS began with recognition of the differences between community colleges and universities and proceeded to collect and use data to better understand the differences and the factors that predict success among urban community college students. TRUCCS has recently published a cumulative report detailing research findings. The report discusses transfer between community colleges and four-year colleges, retention, using web-surveys, patterns of enrollment, the role of Latino representation, the role of urban community college students in educating diverse populations and many more topics. Read the report here.

Source: University of Florida, College of Education [June 2006]

U.S. DOE: 10 STATES FAILED TO COMPLY WITH NCLB PROVISIONS

The U.S. Department of Education has identified 10 states (Hawaii, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Minnesota, Montana, South Dakota, Texas, Maine, and Nebraska) which failed to fully comply with No Child Left Behind testing provisions. The Education Department intends to withhold a portion of the state's administrative funds under the Title I program, and instead, divert them directly to school districts. Twenty-five states along with the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico have also been notified that if they fail to meet timelines for having their testing systems in place by the end of the school year, a portion of their funds could be withheld.

Ten states received either "Full Approval" (Maryland, Oklahoma, Tennessee, West Virginia) or "Full Approval with Recommendations" (Arizona, Delaware, Indiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, Utah). Recommendations essentially mean that the state met all requirements, but one element could be improved. Four states (Alaska, Connecticut, Louisiana, Massachusetts) are categorized under "Approval Expected," meaning these states must submit a plan to correct their testing problems but they do not face an immediate threat of withheld funds. Due to Hurricane Katrina, Mississippi received a one-year extension to meet testing requirements.

Some states plan to appeal their determined status while others will submit plans and timelines for improvement. Additionally, according to State School News, it appears that not one state met the July 7 deadline for having 100 percent of their core classes taught by highly qualified teachers. The U.S. DOE has requested that states submit revised plans that detail how they will meet this goal in the 2006-07 school year. Read more here.

Source: Education Week [July 12, 2006]; State School News Service [July 14, 2006]

QUICK LINKS

New Postsecondary Research Center Grant Awarded
The Community College Resource Center along with Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia, and professors at Harvard University, and Princeton University, have been awarded a five-year grant of $9,813,619 to study the effects of programs designed to help students make the transition to college and master basic skills needed to advance to a degree. This new National Research and Development Center on Postsecondary Education will be the nation's premier research center on higher education that is entirely federally funded. Read more here. Source: CCRC E-Alert [July 12, 2006]

New Report from Education Trust: Teaching Inequality: How Poor and Minority Students Are Shortchanged On Teacher Quality
A recent report from The Education Trust, Teaching Inequality: How Poor and Minority Students Are Shortchanged on Teacher Quality, provides new information on the impact of teacher quality on student achievement and offers specific steps states should take to remedy the persistent practice of denying the best teachers to the children who need them the most. The report claims that poor and minority children don't underachieve in school just because they often enter behind; but, also because the schools that are supposed to serve them actually shortchange them in the one resource they most need to reach their potential high-quality teachers. Read the report here. Source: The Education Trust [June 2006]

STATE BY STATE. . .

Alabama to Track Students with Fixed Identification Number
This fall, Alabama will issue each of its 740,000 K-12 students a random 12-digit number that will track pupils through school systems across the state, year after year. The numbers can be used to look up demographic information about a student, such as their race and age, and school administrators can use that information as a cross-reference to make sure the student is not being counted multiple times in multiple places. Read more here. Source: ASCD SmartBrief [July 18, 2006]

Education Commission of the States: P-16 Collaboration in the States
In June 2006, the Education Commission of the States (ECS) updated its P-16 Collaboration in the States document. The document provides information on the activity of state P-16 councils nationwide, including each council's start date, whether the council's work is P-16, K-16 or P-20 in scope, funding to start or maintain the council's work, the council's goals, whether early learning, high school reform or business involvement is a component of the council's efforts and progress to date. Read the document here. Source: ECS [June 2006]