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National Governors Association Honor States

In 2005, the National Governors’ Association (NGA) cosponsored the National Education Summit on High Schools with Achieve, Inc. The summit focused on creating recommendations for improving high schools so that fewer students would drop out or leave high school unprepared for work. These recommendations were released in An Action Agenda for Improving America’s High Schools. The governors subsequently signed the Graduation Counts Compact, committing to using a single formula to calculate graduation rates across the country.

Following the summit, the NGA, with the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, created two awards for education reform at the state level: Phase One Honor States High School Grants and Phase Two Honor States High School Grants. Phase One grants are intended to assist in the development of comprehensive high school reform to improve graduation and college readiness rates. Ten states have been awarded the 2-year Phase One grants: Arkansas, Delaware, Indiana, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Rhode Island, and Virginia. NGA has committed nearly $20 million for these grants, which began in 2006. Each grantee commits to:

  • Setting 10-year performance goals for improving the high school graduation and college readiness rates (disaggregated by student race/ethnicity and family income), and publicly reporting the goals along with baseline and improvement data.
  • Adopting a longitudinal, 4-year cohort high school graduation measure that tracks individual students and permits valid comparisons among states.
  • Demonstrating an ongoing commitment to an aligned governance structure for P–16 education.
  • Actively participating in the National Education Data Partnership initiative.
  • Creating and executing a communications plan to build and sustain public will for high school redesign.[1]
  • Each state further designs its own set of specific objectives, ranging from college readiness standards to teacher preparation reform to dual enrollment. Altogether, five objectives  have emerged as trends, with five or more states adopting them: revise college- and work-ready standards, strengthen graduation requirements, expand dual-enrollment options, conduct college- and work-ready assessment, and implement a K–16 data system.

An independent committee awarded Phase Two grants to Alabama, Arizona, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Mississippi, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. States are specifically undertaking work in the following areas:

Related Research Base

An evaluation of the Phase One Honor States in 2007 found that all states were making progress in the required reform measures, and most states had made implementing more rigorous standards and curriculum a high priority.[2]

Strong research underpinnings associated with each of the NGA grant focus areas include the following two areas:

Increased rigor and Advanced Placement participation. A rigorous curriculum has been shown to be the single most important factor in college entrance and degree attainment for students attending a 4-year college,[3] and such a curriculum is even more important for African American and Latino students.[4] Demanding coursework also benefits students not attending college; Algebra II appears to be the threshold for better paying, white collar, professional jobs.[5]

Improve teacher knowledge and skills and recruitment and retention. Qualified teachers influence student achievement more than class sizes or overall spending levels.[6] Improving teachers’ professional development, ensuring teachers are both highly qualified and effective, and improving recruitment and retention of highly qualified teachers have been shown to be linked to improved student achievement.

[1] http://www.nga.org

[2] NGA Center for Best Practices. (2006). Redesigning High Schools in 10 Honor States: A Mid-Term Report. Washington, DC: Author.

[3] Adelman, C. (2006). The toolbox revisited: Paths to degree completion from high school through college. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education.

[4] Adelman, C. (1999). Answers in the tool box: Academic intensity, attendance patterns, and bachelor's degree attainment. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education. Accessed February 20, 2008: http://www.ed.gov/pubs/Toolbox/toolbox.html.

[5] Carnevale, A. P., & Desrochers, D. M. 2005. Connecting education standards and employment: Course-taking patterns of young workers. Washington, DC: The American Diploma Project.

[6] Darling Hammond, L. (2000). Teacher quality and student achievement: a review of state policy evidence. Education Policy Analysis Archives. 8 (1). Retrieved April 17, 2008, from: http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v8n1/