The 'Graduation For All Act' was introduced yesterday in the U.S. House of Representatives. It creates a $2 billion competitive grant program to help districts turn around their lowest-performing high schools and their feeder middle schools.

(The bill is not the House version of the Senate's Graduation Promise Act, which was introduced in September. One source tells me the House is still expected to introduce its own version of that bill soon.)

To get the grants, districts have to choose a turnaround strategy, or "model of success," identified in the bill (which are pretty much the four turnaround models touted by Ed Secretary Arne Duncan), and build a team to pull off the turnaround. They also have to implement data-based early warning systems to catch students before they fall seriously off-track, and they have to make sure "teacher talent" is distributed fairly to their schools. Districts also have to provide students with rigorous coursework, and the appropriate academic and social supports, and prepare them for college by helping them design graduation and career plans, offering college-level courses, and providing information about college and financial aid.

There's also $150 million in the bill to support development of early college high schools and dual-enrollment programs. And it calls for research into effective middle school improvement strategies.

Those of you who want to read the text of the new bill or track its progress can go to the Library of Congress search engine and plug in the bill number: H.R. 4122.

You can also check out the press release about the House filing and an outline of the bill.

Rep. George Miller, the California Democrat who chairs the House education committee, said the bill declares that "it is no longer acceptable to let an at-risk student fall through the cracks and empowers schools to make the changes needed to help at-risk students thrive in school, earn a diploma and go on to college or a good job."

Melissa Salmanowitz, a press aide to the House education committee, said the bill represents "an important down payment on the 'S' in ESEA," meaning that its footprint could foreshadow how high school improvement takes shape when the Elementary and Secondary Education Act is reauthorized.

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The U.S. House of Representative's subcommittee on early childhood, elementary and secondary education held a hearing yesterday on improving literacy and reading comprehension. In the high school space, much has been made lately of the need to boost adolescents' reading and writing skills, and to revamp the way high schools teach that stuff. (That is to say, the need to teach literacy explicitly, and tailor that teaching to each subject in which it's taught. I wrote a story recently about a major report by the Carnegie Corporation of New York on this, and another about a high school in Alabama that weaves literacy through its curriculum.)

Speakers at yesterday's hearing gave more than a passing nod to the recent strong focus on adolescent literacy.

The opening statement by Rep. Dale Kildee, the Michigan Democrat who chairs the subcommittee, and the prepared comments of all the speakers—as well as an archived webcast of the hearing, if you'd rather listen or watch—can be found here.

Most of the testimony didn't address the adolescent literacy angle, but a couple of the speakers did. Mary Kay Doré provides an on-the-ground account of how her Colorado district focused on literacy in elementary school and has begun to move it up into middle school. Andrés Henríquez, the program officer who oversees the Carnegie Corporation's adolescent literacy work, provides an overview of the issue in his testimony.

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Parent involvement is often trumpeted as a crucial piece of school success. But getting parents involved in their children's schools is often difficult, especially at the middle and high school level, when adolescents don't exactly welcome the sight of mom or dad at school.

Harvard professor Nancy E. Hill wades into this area with a recent book and research paper. She argues that most policy on parent involvement ignores the differences in approaches that such programs must take in middle and high schools. My colleague Debbie Viadero has a nice story out about Hill and her ideas. Take a look.

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A rash of studies lately have attempted to quantify the economic toll of the high school dropout problem. The newest, issued today by the Alliance for Excellent Education, calculates what it costs the local economies in each of the country's largest metropolitan areas.

Other recent studies have come at the dropout issue from the perspective of what it costs the nation and the states (examples here and here), and what it costs the students themselves. (In April, the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center examined the graduation rate in the nation's biggest cities.)

The alliance's latest research uses a model developed with an Idaho company that specializes in tools for socioeconomic analysis. Funded by State Farm Insurance, the model blends education and jobs data, combined with an examination of each metropolitan region's economy, to estimate the increased wages, education, and tax revenue that would be generated if the dropout rate were cut in half.

Nationwide, it finds that if half of the 599,755 students who dropped out of the class of 2008 had stayed in school to earn their diplomas, about two thirds would have gone on to receive some form of additional training or education. Those graduates would have brought in $4.1 billion in wages during an average year (which the alliance defines as being at about age 39), and generated $536 million in local property, sales, and income taxes during that average year, the study concluded.

The report includes one-page snapshots of how that formula would unfold in each of the 50 largest metropolitan areas. The numbers vary depending on each region's peculiarities. In a conference call with reporters, Bob Wise, the president of the alliance, noted that 84 percent of high school graduates in Honolulu go on to some kind of postsecondary education, compared with 47 percent in Memphis.

Regardless of whether you find fault with some of the presumptions underlying the study (technical notes here), it's interesting reading. Christopher B. Swanson, Editorial Projects in Education's graduation-rate guru, tells me there isn't much else out there that attempts to quantify the cost cities pay for the dropout problem.

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High school students say that doing their homework and studying for class are important, but they are spending more time chatting on the phone, surfing the Web, or watching television, a new survey shows.

The High School Student Engagement Survey, released today, offers this troubling portrait as well as a bunch of other interesting data about adolescents' attitudes and actions in school. Based on 30-minute surveys taken by 134,706 students from high schools big and small across the country, the survey captures scads of boredom and disinterest (half say they're bored every day, and admit that they've skipped school at least once or twice).

They're bored because the material isn't interesting (more than 80 percent), isn't relevant (more than 40 percent), is too difficult (about one quarter), is too easy (about one third), or because they have no interaction with their teachers (about one third).

When they're asked how much time they spend on various activities in the course of a week, a little more than half say they spend an hour or less reading or studying for class. But 60 percent to 70 percent say they spend two or more hours per week watching television, playing video games, surfing or chatting online, or talking on the phone. This is in spite of survey feedback that more than 70 percent of the students rate studying for class as "somewhat important, very important, or top priority."

Anyone who's raised teenagers has seen this disconnect up close and personal. How can schools help them bridge that gap between knowing what's important and actually doing it?

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In the national discussion about lowering the high school dropout rate, the freshman year has emerged as a key area to focus on. We know that it's important to make sure students transition from eighth to ninth grade smoothly and successfully, and to take special care that they stay engaged and on track during their freshman year.

Ninth grade is a particularly leaky part of the education pipeline; it's a place where too many students drop out. (Earlier this year, I wrote about an attempt in Chicago to use data to monitor every student as they enter 9th grade. See also our 2006 Diplomas Count study, showing where we lose students in the graduation pipeline.)

But ninth grade is also a place where too many kids get stuck. A new report from the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore shows that in 2004-05, more than 90,000 students from six states—16 percent of all freshmen—repeated their freshman year. (In South Carolina, it was nearly 30 percent.)

The report's author, Thomas C. West, notes that this "ninth grade bulge" poses distinct challenges as schools and districts try to improve their graduation rates. The good news, however, according to West, is that if educators and policymakers pay attention to ninth grade retention patterns, they can use them to inform their work, seeking more support or making changes where necessary. The report suggested that all states be required to include counts of first-time ninth graders in their data reporting, so ninth grade retention could be better tracked.

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Career and technical education is on the move. It's been reshaping itself from vocational-skills-based programming into a rigorous blend of academics and real-world experience.

California is playing host to a lot of activity in this area, and a new report lays out that interesting landscape for you. The CTE work there is known as "multiple pathways," but that has a very different meaning than it does in New York City, where it has more to do with offering a variety of ways for teenagers—especially those who struggle in traditional school settings—to complete high school. (We used this blog as a forum recently to let experts in these two approaches discuss their differences.)

The new study of California's multiple pathways work is by EdSource, which tracks and dissects education policy developments there. It explores the different forms CTE is taking in the state, and the challenges it faces as it tries to scale up.

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The much-awaited Race to the Top Fund regulations are out, and they make interesting reading (see my colleague Michele McNeil's story, which also links you directly to the regs and supporting documents.) In telling states what will give them the best shot at the $4 billion in grants, the feds give more than a nod to high school improvement, too.

One of the things that will earn states points in the competition is whether they are part of the movement to adopt common college- and career-ready standards and assessments, a consideration with obvious implications for high school. Also important is whether states have sound plans to boost students' and teachers' competency in science, technology, engineering and math, and whether they are working to create an education system that is well aligned from preschool through graduate school.

The regulations also say states will be judged in part on their plans to identify and turn around persistently low-performing schools, including high schools that are not eligible for Title I funding.

In describing its number-one "absolute priority"—a state's comprehensive approach to education reform—the ed department says states must describe, among other things, their plans to increase the number of students graduating from high school ready for college and careers.

The regulations also express the feds' interest in states' plans to award credit to students based on performance rather than on seat time.

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We've heard it before, but here it comes again: today's students must have some postsecondary training or education in order to get good jobs.

One of the most respected voices on what today's workplace requires of new entrants, Anthony P. Carnevale, has a new paper out arguing that adolescents have virtually no shot at middle-class earnings without some form of education after high school.

An interesting tidbit on that, though: while more education is better than less, it isn't necessarily true that higher-level degrees carry more paycheck cash than lower-level ones. Two in 10 of those with occupational or vocational associate of arts degrees earn more than the median earnings of those with bachelor's, and 14 percent earn more than the median earnings of people with graduate degrees, he says. One-quarter of those with bachelor's degrees earn less than those with associate degrees.

He also argues that the United States faces a shortage of college-educated workers because young people are not obtaining degrees at a quick enough rate to replace retiring baby boomers.

Arguments like Carnevale's support the tilt of rhetoric from President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who have been calling on more Americans to get postsecondary training or education. But not everyone agrees that the new workplace demands college-level skill. For other perspectives, check out reports by Paul E. Barton, a respected researcher who used to head up the Educational Testing Service's Policy Information Center (here and here).

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This year's National Survey of Student Engagement is out, and it offers some interesting ideas about how to judge whether colleges are doing right by their students.

This annual study of college students' attitudes about their higher-education experience is even more interesting at a time when President Obama is calling for more students to get some kind of postsecondary education, and momentum is building behind the idea that higher education needs to redouble its efforts to support students.

USA Today has an interesting story about how feedback from the NSSE has brought about change in some colleges.

On a related note, the National Governors Association put out a new brief that offers states guidance as they try to find ways to measure their colleges' student achievement.

The NGA points out that inadequate data has hampered states in evaluating how well their colleges are doing. Funding colleges based on enrollment, or on "attempted credits" rather than completed credits, creates no incentive to boost student achievement, the NGA says. Measuring their success with a graduation-rate formula that excludes large numbers of community college students and others doesn't yield an accurate picture of how well colleges are doing in their central mission.

The organization urges states to track students' rates of completing remedial and core courses, and advancing from remedial to credit-bearing courses. It also calls for tracking their rates of transfer from two-year to four-year institutions, and their attainment of credentials.

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