At the recent High School Redesign in Action conference, sponsored by the New England Secondary School Consortium (NESSC), I heard a very interesting story about how a small high school was able to turnaround with limited external help. 

Deer Isle-Stonington High School is a small high school on a bridged island in Maine. It serves 142 students in grades nine through 12, with 17 teachers and one principal. In…

Read More

On Tuesday, February 28, Dr. Laura C. Brown, Director of Georgia Learning Resources System (GLRS), presented a Webinar titled, “GraduateFIRST: The Dropout Prevention Destination.” During this event, Dr. Brown described Georgia’s GraduateFIRST program, identified ways schools can make improvements, shared tools and resources available to schools, and highlighted the successes of specific schools using the program.

GraduateFIRST has a two-fold mission aimed at (1) increasing graduation rates for students with…

Read More

The American Institutes for Research (AIR), as a partner in the California Comprehensive Center at WestEd, has been working with the California Department of Education’s (CDE) K-12 Office of Innovation and Improvement (formerly the Middle Grades Improvement Office) over the past year to identify key strategies California schools use to help students transition from the middle grades to high school and graduate.  They have recently authored a report, Making…

Read More

On Friday, November 18, 2011, the American Youth Policy Forum (AYPF) held an event on Capitol Hill to address the high school dropout problem. The event, Dropping Out: Why Students Drop Out of High School and What Can Be Done About It, featured an overview of Dr. Russell Rumberger’s latest book and his recommendations for addressing the dropout problem. A panel of experts, including Elizabeth Grant (Special Assistant,…

Read More

The National High School Center is pleased to announce the release of a new Early Warning System Middle Grades (EWS MG) Tool and an enhanced Early Warning System High School (EWS HS) Tool. Both free, Microsoft Excel-based tools rely on readily available student-level data (attendance, course failures, grade point average, credit accumulation, and behavior) to identify middle grade and high school students who show early warning signs that they…

Read More

The California Comprehensive Center at WestEd conducted a research study aimed at identifying middle-to-high school transition practices  at California schools with graduation rates that were higher than predicted. They found that some schools used a “Regional Model” that leveraged collaboration and cross-school communication to ease transition and raise graduation rates.

A Regional Model system organizes schools into geographical clusters, grouping high schools with their feeder elementary and middle schools.…

Read More

Last week, NCES released Trends in High School Dropout and Completion Rates in the United States: 1972–2009, a report which identifies trends in dropout and school completion data. The report tracks four different measures of dropout: Event Dropout Rates, Status Dropout Rates, Status Completion Rates, and Average Freshman Graduation Rates (AFGR). Each measure is calculated differently and can be used to inform different educational questions.

For instance, the Event…

Read More