Alliance
for Excellent Education Conference Focuses on High School Policy The Alliance
for Excellent Education (AEE) hosted its first annual high school policy conference,
Challenges Confronting High Schools: Literacy, Adequacy, and Equity November 17-18,
2003 in Washington, DC. The conference brought key people together to learn about
the research, best practices, and leadership needed to reach the six million middle
school and high school students most at risk of academic failure. The conference
convincingly conveyed to participants an understanding that effective research-based
strategies exist to improve adolescent literacy and increase student success overall. Conference
sessions explored the lack
of literacy that millions of adolescents face and the barriers to individual
opportunity and the consequences for our communities that this problem creates.
Solutions are available, and conference speakers explained approaches that work
and ways of raising public support for critical programs. Senators Jeff Bingaman
(NM) and Patty Murray (WA), among other distinguished guests, discussed federal
legislative proposals that they have recently introduced, which would help "at-risk"
teenagers graduate from high school and go on to college.
The conference
also addressed the need for adequate and equitable education funding by highlighting
the over 30 years of school funding
litigations -- brought in state courts across
the country -- and by introducing participants to the process of "costing-out"
and implementing an "adequate" education. Representatives from Kentucky
and New York, among others, provided
insights into the legal and legislative challenges they have encountered and successes
attained in their efforts to ensure the opportunity for an adequate education
to all students. Speakers from Maine,
Maryland and New
Jersey also recounted their experiences with defining and costing-out an adequate
education in their states. Next year's conference on high school policy
will take place on October 4-5.
Prepared by Molly A.
Hunter, December 2, 2003
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