In a recent video blog, Gov. Beverly Perdue pledged continuing support for early college high schools after receiving an email from a citizen concerned about funding for the innovative schools.

Here's part of her response: "It's critical that we do whatever it takes to keep kids in school, and kids have got have skill sets to compete in the 21st century workforce. I believe a lot of these early college programs make it possible for kids who don't fit in to the traditional public school classroom to go on and get what they need and two years of community college."

She notes that her budget proposal includes nearly $2.5 million in additional funding to add 12 new schools this year, so the program "is not just intact but growing."

"Early college programs are critical to the future," she said. "Early college is a definite tool that works in a 21st century economy."

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The connection between the nation's economic competitiveness and its persistently high dropout rates and low graduation statistics were put under a microscope earlier this week by a Congressional committee.

The panel heard testimony from a number of leading experts in high school innovation, including Vicki Phillips, education director for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education; and Robert Balfanz, a leading high school researcher and co-director of the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University.

Rep. George Miller, a California Democrat who is chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, opened the hearing by taking a measure of the scope of the problem.

"Some may think twice about using the word "crisis" to define what's happening in our high schools," he said in prepared remarks. "But the truth is, we aren't just facing a crisis -- the house is on fire."

He cited the statistics: 70 percent graduation rate, 55 percent four-year graduation rate for black students, 52 percent for Hispanics, Census data showing that nearly 20 percent of males between 16 and 24  have dropped out, the nation's low rank among industrialized countries -- 18th of 24 -- for high school graduation rates.

In her testimony, Phillips said that even among students who do graduate, too few of them are making strong gains during high school.

"We need to face the fact that too many students in high school are frozen; they are not making nearly the academic progress they need to make to be ready for the demands of college, work and life," she said in her prepared statement.

To reverse that, she said, students need to make a "breakthrough" in performance, which the Gates Foundation believes can be achieved with a three-pronged strategy that focuses on teacher effectiveness and empowerment, the importance of standards that are fewer, clearer and higher and the pursuit of innovations that can lead to dramatic improvements in performance.

"The evidence is clear that the combination of high schools as currently constructed and the tools in our hands will not be sufficient to meet our goal of 80 percent of low-income students ready for college by 2025," Phillips said. "We cannot make a leap in performance without a leap in innovation that much more directly and productively engages students in accelerating their learning.

"We are going to continue to fund school models that break the mold and achieve results, and next generation models of teaching and learning. The measure for the success of any innovation will be true acceleration of performance -- as measured by student achievement."

Phillips said also that the Gates Foundation will focus more sharply on innovations that drive improvements in 9th grade performance. "Students' achievement in 9th grade is remarkably predictive of their later performance," she said. "If they fall behind in this crucial year, it is very hard to catch up."

Balfanz, who has done pioneering research into what he has termed "dropout factories," said that the urban and rural areas where such schools are located face dim prospects.

"There is no way for these cities, towns and neighborhoods to reinvent themselves without high schools that prepare all their students for post-secondary schooling or training," Balfanz said in his testimony.

But he also said that the concentration of these schools -- about 2,000 -- in a limited number of locations around the nation makes the problem solvable. He pointed to cities such as New York and Chicago, and states such as North Carolina, Alabama, Arkansas and Kentucky that are making notable progress and pioneering innovations that are gaining national momentum.

"This tells us that progress occurs when will and know-how are combined with sufficient capacity and accountability systems that encourage effort and innovation."

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