National Youth Employment Coalition: Information Center


NCLB High School Graduation Rate: Non-Regulatory Guidance (Dec. 2008)
	On October 29, 2008, the Department published final regulations amending the existing regulations implementing Title I, Part A of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA), as amended by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB). The amendments included changes to 34 C.F.R. Â§200.19, regarding the "other academic indicators" that States use in defining "adequate yearly progress" (AYP). This non-regulatory guidance provides States, LEAs, and schools with information about how to implement the provisions in 34 C.F.R. Â§200.19(b). Section A of this guidance defines the four-year adjusted cohort graduation rate, the extended-year adjusted cohort graduation rate, and the transitional graduation rates that are allowable until States must implement the four-year adjusted cohort graduation rate. Section B guides States in setting a single graduation rate goal and annual graduation rate targets. Section C outlines requirements for reporting graduation rate. Section D answers questions about how States include the four-year adjusted cohort graduation rate and any extended-year adjusted cohort graduation rate in AYP determinations, including the use of disaggregated rates for student subgroups. Section E provides information about how a State must revise its Consolidated State Application Accountability Workbook (Accountability Workbook) to include certain information and submit its revisions to the Department for technical assistance and peer review. Section F clarifies the timeline for implementing the new graduation rate provisions, as well as the process for how a State that cannot meet the deadlines outlined in the final regulations may request, from the Secretary, an extension of time to meet the requirements.

Meaningful Measurement: The Role of Assessments in Improving High School Education in the Twenty-First Century (June 2009)
	As the nation embraces the goal of graduating all students college and career ready, there is a growing movement to realign standards, assessments, and accountability systems to that goal. Meaningful Measurement: The Role of Assessments in Improving High School Education in the Twenty-First Century, is a collection of essays by leading experts that discuss important assessment issues, examines promising assessment practices from across the globe, and offers recommendations on how the federal government can support an assessment agenda for the twenty-first century. Topics include: assessments that measure studentsâ?? college and career readiness, performance assessments, the role of benchmark assessments, assessing high school students who are English Language learners and students with disabilities, the benefits of international assessments, the role of technology in improving assessments and their use, and how assessment design affects the implementation of a growth model at the high school level. Chapter authors include Andreas Schleicher of the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), Linda Darling-Hammond and Ray Pecheone of the School Redesign Network at Stanford, Rick Stiggins of the ETS Assessment Training Institute, and Judy Wertzel, formerly of the Aspen Institute.

A New Model of Student Assessment for the 21st Century - September, 2008
	The authors of this publication assert that traditional systems of assessing student performance help to produce school failure and commonly-used hundred-year old structural mechanisms have, in fact, become powerful barriers to academic achievement. To counteract these systems, the authors create the Youth Women's Leadership Charter School, a public charter high school serving low-income and minority young women in inner-city Chicago, and they describe their school's new model of teaching and assessment. This experience-based report explores the ways that standardized instructional time, semester grading, and Carnegie units influence many students to underperform and prevent failing students from getting back on track to meeting rigorous standards for graduation. The new assessment system based upon individual student mastery consistently produced higher levels of learning, high school graduation, and college attendance at the charter school. This is a provocative primer for other school reformers. - By Camille Farrington and Margaret Small, Washington, DC: American Youth Policy Forum, September 25, 2008

Avoidable Losses: High-Stakes Accountability & the Dropout Crisis
	In the state of Texas, whose standardized, high-stakes test-based accountability system became the model for the nation's most comprehensive federal education policy, more than 135,000 youth are lost from the state's high schools every year. Dropout rates are highest for African American and Latino youth, more than 60% for the students we followed. Findings from this study, which included analysis of the accountability policy in operation in high-poverty high schools in a major urban district, analysis of student-level data for more than 271,000 students in that district over a seven-year period under this policy, and extensive ethnographic analysis of life in schools under the policy, show that the state's high-stakes accountability system has a direct impact on the severity of the dropout problem. The study carries great significance for national education policy because its findings show that disaggregation of student scores by race does not lead to greater equity, but in fact puts our most vulnerable youth, the poor, the English language learners, and African American and Latino children, at risk of being pushed out of their schools so the school ratings can show "measurable improvement." High-stakes, test-based accountability leads not to equitable educational possibilities for youth, but to avoidable losses of these students from our schools. Authors: Linda McSpadden McNeil, Eileen Coppola, Judy Radigan, Rice University; Julian Vasquez Heilig, University of Texas-Austin