Longitudinal data on HS graduation & dropout rates

Nevada still tops the list--of lowest graduation rates (51.3%). Wisconsin must be doing something right since they graduate 89.6% of their students. Data from NCES covers the period 1978-2008 and is also broken down by race/ethnicity, sex and age. Overall, "approximately 3 million 16- through 24-year-olds were not enrolled in high school and had not earned a high school diploma or alternative credential as of October 2008, [representing] 8 percent of the 38 million non-institutionalized, civilian individuals in this age group living in the United States..." Highest dropout rates continue to be among Hispanic Americans while Asian Americans and students of more than one race have the lowest rates. Full report is here:
http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2011012

2010 Condition of Education available

"The National Center for Education Statistics today released The Condition of Education, a Congressionally mandated report to the nation on education in America today. It covers all aspects of education, with 49 indicators that include findings on enrollment trends, demographics, and outcomes.

The report projects that public school enrollment will rise from 49 million in 2008 to 52 million by 2019, with the largest increase expected in the South. Over the past decade, more students attended both charter schools and high-poverty schools (those in which more than 75 percent of the students qualified for free or reduced-price lunch). One in six U.S. students attends a high-poverty school; and the number of charter school students has tripled since 1999."

The report is also linked under the Statistics and Demographics tab on the Education subject guide.

6 Technologies to watch for in education

From the January 14, 2010 issue of Wired Campus...
"The Horizon Report," an annual guide to tech trends... And it’s predicting a new technology king: open content.After failing to make last year's “Technologies to Watch” list, the open-content movement now joins mobile computing as the two trends most likely to enter mainstream learning in the next year, says the report, from the New Media Consortium and Educause.

The end of the university as we know it??

A provocative but balanced article, "College for $99 a Month," in the Washington Monthly by think tank analyst Kevin Carey (policy director of Education Sector). There's been a fair amount of controversy over this model & this particular company, but it is, probably, an inevitable "disruptive innovation" to the higher education model. Good article...well worth the read.
An excerpt:
"Like Craigslist, StraighterLine threatens the most profitable piece of a conglomerate business: freshman lectures, higher education’s equivalent of the classified section. If enough students defect to companies like StraighterLine, the higher education industry faces the unbundling of the business model on which the current system is built. The consequences will be profound....Regional public universities and non-elite private colleges are most at risk from the likes of StraighterLine. They could go the way of the local newspaper, fatally shackled to geography, conglomeration, and an expensive labor structure, too dependent on revenues that vanish and never return."

The company's founder has been frustrated by the push back from students and faculty at institutions with which he has tried to partner (in order to get accreditation cover for courses students complete online). "But neither the regulatory nor the psychological obstacles match the evolving new reality... The accreditation wall will crumble, as most artificial barriers do. All it takes is for one generation of college students to see online courses as no more or less legitimate than any other—and a whole lot cheaper in the bargain—for the consensus of consumer taste to rapidly change. The odds of this happening quickly are greatly enhanced by the endless spiral of steep annual tuition hikes, which are forcing more students to go deep into debt to pay for college while driving low-income students out altogether. If Burck Smith doesn’t bring extremely cheap college courses to the masses, somebody else will."

New PEW report on the future of the Internet

Links to all portions of the new PEW report, "The Future of the Internet III," are available here as are links to earlier reports. Just in case you run out of things to read over the semester break :-)

Status and Trends in the Education of American Indians and Alaska Natives: 2008

"This report examines both the educational progress of American Indian/Alaska Native children and adults and challenges in their education. It shows that over time more American Indian/Alaska Native students have gone on to college and that their attainment expectations have increased. Despite these gains, progress has been uneven and differences persist between American Indian/Alaska Native students and students of other racial/ethnic groups on key indicators of educational performance." (Description from website)