In the first wave of funding under a revitalized high school graduation initiative, the U.S. Department of Education is betting nearly $50 million that it can help states and school districts find better ways to hang onto students who might drop out and bring back those who have disappeared without diplomas. Twenty-nine states and districts won grants last month of up to $3 million to work with schools whose dropout rates exceed their state average. The $46.6 million is envisioned as the first year's installment on five-year grants, although subsequent years' funding isn't guaranteed, since the grants depend on the federal budget. Crossing its fingers that the program maintains its current support for a few years, the Education Department hopes to use it to exert leverage on high school graduation rates, which hover around 70 percent nationally and can sink below 50 percent in poor communities. The federal agency supports secondary school reform through other means, but it stepped up its support of dropout prevention and recovery by securing $50 million for the "High School Graduation Initiative" in fiscal 2010. The program--formerly called the Dropout Prevention Initiative--got no money at all in the preceding three years and only $5 million a year in the three years before that.