Issue/Policy Brief

This issue brief from the Association for Career and Technical Education (ACTE) discusses the role that career and technical education (CTE) programs have in helping students successfully transition from secondary to postsecondary education. The authors begin by noting the statistics on students who make the transition from high school to college and those who actually complete a postsecondary degree.

This brief from Jobs for the Future provides an overview of Early College High School (ECHS) models, and the state policies that support this educational model. The authors describe why these are a beneficial yet underutilized resource and provide recommendations for state legislation and collaboration that will help to increase access to ECHS and maximize the benefits and rewards to students who choose to attend them.

This research brief from the National High School Center summarizes student and teacher outcomes, lessons learned, and other findings from an American Institutes for Research evaluation of the Alabama Reading Initiative at the secondary school level. The Alabama Reading Initiative (ARI) addresses literacy and includes a focus on high school students.

This article describes the history of the 9th-grade bulge problem and discusses promising reforms.

This article discusses the nation's declining graduation rate and the increasing percentage of students who are stuck in the 9th-grade bottleneck and fail to progress into 10th grade on time. The resource offers suggestions for reducing the 9th-grade bulge including increasing both visibility of the problem and support services.

This position paper from the Association for Career and Technical Education reviews the challenges and current efforts in high school redesign, and offers nine recommendations of the role career and technical education (CTE) should play in future efforts to reinvent high schools for the 21st century.

This brief from The Education Trust explores the need for stronger federal policy that requires high schools to adopt graduation rates – in addition to achievement indicators – as a measure for student and school progress. By identifying varying state-based definitions of Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) and successful state policies, it suggests ways in which No Child Left Behind (NCLB) can be altered when reauthorized to improve outcomes for all student subgroups across the country.

This Alliance for Excellent Education policy brief provides an overview of the data collected on student writing achievement, recommends more opportunities for students to practice writing in school, encourages schools to teach better writing instruction, and offers policymakers suggestions on how to support school improvement efforts in this area.

Many states and districts across the country struggle with designing and implementing coherent dropout prevention initiatives that promote academic advancement, especially for special needs students, who drop out at much higher rates than the general student population. This snapshot from the National High School Center recognizes New Hampshire for its innovative use of data collection and analysis as the key to unlocking the dropout problem.

As many Title I high schools approach their fifth year of failing to meet adequate yearly progress (AYP), many states and districts are struggling to navigate the new waters of school restructuring as required in such cases as the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001. This brief from the National High School Center outlines the provisions of the law related to restructuring and includes strategies that states and districts are undertaking to meet their obligations under the law, particularly at the high school level.