This year's report focuses on efforts to redesign high schools. Those include incorporating student voice, implementing a rigorous and relevant curriculum, embracing career exploration, and more. The report also includes the latest statistics on the nation's overall, on-time high school graduation rate. Articles include: (1) To Build a Better High…

Teach For America's (TFA) shift over the past decade toward measuring and promoting its teachers' ability to boost student performance has caused the organization to reconfigure not just program directors' roles, but nearly all its other support components. It has overhauled its five-week summer training, known as "Institute," to incorporate the…

A new report proposes academic pathways that would lead some students toward careers rather than college, and that is raising fears among advocates for the disadvantaged. Leaders of the "Pathways to Prosperity" project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education argue for an education system that clearly articulates students' career options as…

The General Educational Development program, or GED, is undergoing the biggest revamping in its 69-year history, driven by mounting recognition that young adults' future success depends on getting more than a high-school-level education. Potent forces have converged to stoke the GED's redesign. A labor market that increasingly seeks some…

Courses focused on renewable and alternative energy are taking hold across the country as educators seek to channel students' concerns about the environment and conservation into classroom lessons. This article talks about the rising interest in "green" curriculum. Here, the author describes the Green Tech class that introduces students to the…

Teacher collaboration is hailed as one of the most effective ways to improve student learning, and one high school in Illinois is often credited with perfecting the concept. This article features Adlai E. Stevenson High School which was one of the first in the U.S. to embrace what are known as professional learning communities. The professional…

This article describes how the National Association for Urban Debate Leagues is reviving debate competitions among high school students in city schools. Starting in Atlanta in 1985 and boosted by seed money from the billionaire George Soros' Open Society Institute, urban educators and their supporters in 2002 formed the National Association for…

Policy experts are renewing questions about the role of school culture and leadership in the drive to improve teaching effectiveness in the most-challenging school environments. As states and districts increasingly explore tactics like performance-based pay, incentive programs, and bonuses to attract the best teachers to troubled schools, experts…

The Chicago Annenberg Challenge, chaired from 1995 to 1999 by Barack Obama, is being portrayed by John McCain's campaign as an attempt to push radicalism on schools. Founders of the project say it has been distorted in the presidential campaign. The project undertaken in Chicago as part of a high-profile national initiative reflected, however,…

The numbers tell a grim story: By the time students with behavioral or emotional problems get to high school, they may be so alienated from adults or disruptive to their classmates that they simply drop out. According to a 2006 report from the U.S. Department of Education, the high school graduation rate for students identified as emotionally…

This article discusses how the philanthropy of Microsoft Corp software magnate co-chairs, Bill Gates and his wife Melinda, are reshaping the American high school nowadays. Gates and his wife have put the issue on the national agenda like never before, with a commitment of more than 1.3 billion US dollars this decade toward the foundation's agenda…

Even before a single student had signed up for High Tech High School, the founders of the new charter school on San Diego Bay knew they did not want that first school to be their last. They wanted to affect more children. To that end, Larry G. Rosenstock, the founding principal of the highly regarded 5-year-old school, and other leaders of the…

This article reports how Kaplan K12 Learning Services Group, a division of Kaplan Inc., has developed a new, standardized college-preparatory curriculum for the Philadelphia school district. The curriculum, which made its debut in the Philadelphia district in 2005, was a critical element in the district leadership's plan to improve secondary…

It is not unusual to hear students at the Cesar Chavez Learning Center say that if they were not able to go to this kind of school, they would have given up on formal education a long time ago. Housed in a strip mall a mile and a half from the U.S.-Mexican border, the Chavez center allows students to attend school for a half day--morning or…

Computer software that shows students visual models of mathematical concepts--and lets them manipulate those models by doing math--has a certain intuitive appeal. Now, recent research on SimCalc Mathworlds, one of the pioneering examples of such software, is providing some of the best evidence so far that the approach can lead to gains in student…