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Last month, the United States Chamber of Commerce and College Summit, an education nonprofit group, announced the release of a new report: “Business Engagement in Education, Key Partners for Improving Student Success.” The report focuses on the large number of students who do not graduate from high school and do not graduate college and career ready.

The Alliance for Excellent Education hosted a Webinar entitled Strengthening High School Teaching and Learning in New Hampshire’s Competency-Based System on January 22, 2013. The Webinar focused on New Hampshire’s competency-based system for determining student progress.

A new National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) report finds that 78% of high school students, or about 1.3 million students, finished ‘on time’ in 2010. According to Public School Graduates and Dropouts from the Common Core of Data: School Year 2009–10, this is the nation’s highest high school graduation rate since 1976.

The graduating public high school class of 2022 is projected to increase by five percent over the 2008-09 class, according to a new report from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).

The Center on Education Policy’s (CEP) 11th annual report, State High School Exit Exams: A Policy in Transition, is based on data from 45 state education departments. It builds upon the group’s earlier work on a more comprehensive look at exit exam policy and practice, and existing trends in high school exit assessments.

The school-to-prison pipeline is a national trend in which students are pushed out of school and into the juvenile justice system. Research indicates that the pipeline is an unintended consequence of increasingly harsh school discipline policies such as “zero tolerance.” Additionally, schools increasingly rely on law enforcement to handle minor disciplinary issues previously administered internally. This creates the initial link between the classroom and the criminal justice system. Harsh discipline policies often disproportionally affect minority students and students with disabilities.

Family homelessness is an increasingly prevalent problem that detracts from a student’s ability to develop and learn the skills needed to graduate high school. One in 45 children, or 1.6 million children, are homeless in the U.S. every year, according to the National Center on Family Homelessness (The National Center). Family homeless may be caused by a variety of factors, including lack of affordable housing, domestic violence, poverty, decreasing government supports, the challenges of raising children alone, or lack of social supports.

Looking for new high school-related resources? Here are some pieces that the National High School Center and other organizations have recently released:*

Did you know that 2,993,120 students graduated high school in 2011? These and other demographic and achievement statistics about high schools in the United States can be found in the National High School Center’s recently released Quick Stats Fact Sheet: High Schools in the United States.