YES HE WILL?: Campaign Details Suggest That Obama Presidency Will Make Education Reform a High Priority: Throughout his campaign for president, Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) stressed the importance of education to the future of the nation, consistently listing it, along with health care and energy independence, as among his top three priorities. However, the bigger question is not whether Obama will focus on education reform, but when he will be able to do so, especially given the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room that is the American economy.

A NEW WAY FORWARD FOR THE GATES FOUNDATION: Bill Gates Expresses Support for National Standards, Performance Pay for Teachers: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has invested nearly $4 billion since 2000 to help students, especially low-income and minority youth, “graduate from high school ready to succeed in college, career, and life.” During those eight years, the foundation experienced success in improving student achievement among individual schools and in pockets of the country, but struggled to replicate successful models nationally. That was the message that Bill Gates, cochair and trustee of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, delivered to a meeting of educational leaders in Seattle on November 11.

THE “MUST HAVE” SKILLS: Education Sector Report Makes Case for Incorporating Modern Skills Into Assessments: The primarily multiple-choice tests used to assess reading and math ability, though useful for meeting proficiency targets for the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), generally are not helpful in determining a student’s college- and work-readiness. So says Education Sector in its new report, Measuring Skills for the 21st Century. Within the report, Education Sector does not call for the creation of additional tests but instead declares “a need for better tests that measure more of the skills students need to succeed today.”

SOMETHING IN COMMON: Under New Regulations, States Must Adopt Uniform Calculation for High School Graduation Rates by 2010: In order to bring more coherence to the way states calculate what percentage of students graduate from high school, U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings announced on October 28 that states must use a uniform calculation for determining every high school’s graduation rate. The rule, which will become effective beginning in the 2010–11 school year, was part of the long-awaited final regulations for Title I of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB).

COUNTING ON GRADUATION: Ed Trust Report Examines State Policies on Graduation Rates: Noting that the new federal regulations are likely to increase transparency around how well states and schools graduate their students, a new report from The Education Trust argues that most state accountability systems still exhibit a “surprising indifference” toward improving high school graduation rates. According to the report, Counting on Graduation, the graduation rate goals that states set under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) range from a low of 50 percent in Nevada to a high of 95 percent in Indiana.

RELATIONSHIPS, RIGOR, AND READINESS: New Report Examines Urban District Interventions to Improve Student Achievement: The reforms that some urban districts employ are promising and grounded in research-based principles, but little is known about their effectiveness in raising student attainment and achievement because they have not been rigorously tested. In order to better identify strategies for improving underperforming high schools, practitioners and researchers should build a shared learning community in which researchers are responsive to the needs of district and school leaders and practitioners are committed to taking lessons from research and to building knowledge as they innovate.

ONE DREAM, TWO REALITIES: Report Finds Many Parents Feel Shut Out of Their Children’s Schools: An overwhelming majority of parents have high aspirations for their children and think it is important to be involved in their children’s education. However, parents of children in low-performing high schools feel that they lack the tools and information to do so. So finds One Dream, Two Realities: Perspectives of Parents on America’s High Schools, the new report by Civic Enterprises in association with Peter D. Hart Research Associates and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation...