WASHINGTON – At a news briefing on Tuesday at the U.S. Capitol, a group of representatives from the Campaign for High School Equity coalition unveiled the campaign’s new “Plan For Success” while urging lawmakers to take more decisive steps toward addressing the nation’s high school dropout rate.
While the CHSE coalition consists of a handful of civil rights organizations—including the National Urban League, National Council of La Raza, and the NAACP—panelists agreed that implementing core standards would be key to addressing the inequities that minority students face in secondary education.
CHSE’s updated “Plan for Success” includes a number of policy prescriptions, such as making sure that high schools and districts calculate graduation rates based on a common method, implementing new graduation benchmarks, and emphasizing high-quality teaching.
The panelists called the reauthorization of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act a central pillar of the push for high school equity. They also expressed strong opposition to the so-called “flexibility bill,” a Senate proposal, which would give local governments more freedom to reapportion funds or consolidate programs.
Dianne Piche, senior counsel and education program director at The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said that such measures are troublesome because it would mean that school districts could move funds out of high-poverty schools.
“This was not a flexibility bill. This was an elimination bill,” said Phillip Lovell, vice president for federal advocacy at the Alliance for Education. The bill, he said, virtually “abdicates the federal responsibility in education.”
Michael Wotorson, director of the Campaign for High School Equity, said that the central purpose of the updated plan is to address the nation’s persistently high dropout rate, which remained at what he calls “crisis levels” for years.On average, about 1.3 million students drop out of high school each year, according to the CHSE. Only 55 percent of Black and Latino students graduate, Wotorson said.
