The American High School Crisis and State Policy Solutions

Florida's A+ Plan for Education

Forum panelists, including Kristin Conklin of NGA, contributed essays that addressed state policy issues related to small schools, the secondary/postsecondary transition, and standards, assessments and curriculum.

For their American High School Crisis and State Policy Solutions national forum, NGA's Center for Best Practices and the National Center for Education and the Economy (NCEE) invited panelists and other experts on secondary and postsecondary education to draft short essays that reflect on high school reform from a number of perspectives. The compilation of essays includes:

• An introduction by Hilary Pennington, Jobs for the Future;
• The Danish model by Roland Svarrer Osterlund of the Danish Ministry of Education and Marc Tucker, NCEE;
• State solutions by Kristin Conklin of NGA, Stanley Jones of the Indiana Commission for Higher Education, Duke Albanese, former Maine commissioner of education, and Patricia McNeil, former assistant secretary of education; and
• Promising practices and issues for scaling up, by Karen Daniels of Boston's Excel High School, Chester E. Finn, Jr. of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, and Tom Toch of NCEE.