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Photographs for TIME by Katja HeinemannAurora

Lifekids who quit schooldont just sud denlydropout; itsmoreofaslow fade.Typically itbeginsin the ninth grade, if not earlier, often whenlifehits aparticularlynastypatchandrackingup credits inclass no longer seems especiallycompelling or plausible. Ernestine Maisonetstartedfadingin eighthgrade,whenthegrand-mother who had raised her died. She was awoman who worked wonders, murmursMaisonet, who says she doesnt know hermother and isnt close to her dad. After thedeath, her family of six siblings fell apart.Maisonet has lived sometimes with an aunt,sometimes with a boyfriend, and sometimesshe had no place to go. I was a good studentuntilmygrandmother passedaway, says the19-year-old redhead from the Bronx. Thoughshe was enrolled in high school, she earnedjust three credits in two years: I completelyshutdown. I didntdogoodatall.

TanyaGarcia, 19,of Brooklynalsowentoff track at the end of middle school. A re de-stroyed her familys apartment and left themhomeless for four months. She landed in alarge, impersonalhighschool,andquicklybe-

came disengaged. I started getting intodrugsweed, drinking, cocaine andheroin.Aftertwoyearsofmostlycuttingclass,shehadaccumulateda grandtotalofonecredit.Whenshe tried to transfer to another school, thedean pretty much laughed in my face, shesays.At16,shestoppedgoingtoschool.Idid-nt see myself having any kind of future. Iwould get somejob I hated and just survive.

Against all odds, Maisonet and Garcia areslated to graduate in New York Citys class of 2007. They are among some 13,000 students

whodroppedoutorwereonthevergeofdoingso but have been recovered in the public

school system. The citys secret? Finding outwhowasdroppingoutandwhyandofferingavarietyofpathscompletewith intensiveso-cial support and personalized instruction

back toschool.Nationally about 1 in 3 high school stu-

dentsquitsschool.AmongblackandHispanicstudents,therateiscloserto50%.Fordecades,school districts obscured the hemorrhagingwith sleight of handusing misleading for-mulas to calculate graduation rates and notbothering to track the kids who fell throughthecracks. Getting a more honestaccountingbecame a top priority for the Bill & MelindaGatesFoundation,whichwas instrumentalinpersuading the Governors of all 50 states to

agree in 2005 to start measuring graduationratesinafairandconsistentway.AskMelinda

Gates to name the foundations top achieve-ment ineducationso far, andshe doesnthesi-tate to answer, Getting the nation to look atgraduation rates in therightway.

In 2005, New York used Gates funding tocommission the Parthenon Group, a Boston-basedconsultingrm,todigdeepintoitsgrad-uation data. The resulting 64-page report,released last October, enabled the nationslargest school district to discern how manykids itwas losing, which onesand when. Justas important, it showedwhat wasworking tosalvage high-riskkids like Maisonet and Gar-cia.

New YorkaskedParthenontofocusonstu-dents who were two or more years behind

their peers in accumulating credits towardgraduation. We hada hunch that these over-

BY CLAUDIA WALLIS

EDUCATION

Stopping the Exodus. New York City has more dropouts thanmost cities have students. It also has more ways to help them

GuidanceTanya GarciaseesAndy Vernon-Jones, heradvocate-counselor, on a dailybasis

EDUCATION BUSINESS

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ternoon and evening for students 17or older,was enabling about 40%of these last-chancestudents to graduate.

New Yorkdiscovered that itsmost vulner-able ninth-gradersthe weakreadersweremuch more likely to stay on track towardgraduation at the citys newer and smallerhigh schools than at its large conventionalones. Abigaha,saysHamilton, isthatasin-glestrategywasnotgoingto work.Youneedaportfolio of strategies. In the wake of thereport, the city has examined what the besttransferschools, yabc sand ged programsweredoing right and is trying to replicate themcitywide.

ItseasytospotwhatsgoingrightatSouthBrooklyn Community High, the transferschool that Garcia attends. Its obvious theminutethedoorsopen.Waitingin thebright,airy reception area are six advocate-counselors,orACs.Eachcounsels25orsokids,whomtheygreet individually,oftenwithelab-orate,personalizedhandshakesorstpounds.

These close relationships are cemented bydaily meetings and twice-weekly group ses-sions. When any of theschools 150 studentsfailto showupin the morning,the AC makesaphonecall tondoutwhy.FreddiePerez,17,compares thiswith thecheck-inprocedureat

the big high school he used to attend: Idswipe my ID at the beginning of school andthen gobackout the door,hesays.

TheACsare notschool-districtemployees;theywork fora nonprot organizationcalledGood Shepherd Services. Every New Yorktransfer schooland yabc ispairedwitha com-munity-basedorganization thatfocusesonthesocial, emotional and family issues that tendtoweighdownthesestudents.Wedonthavethe expertise for these complex challenges,explains schools chancellor Joel Klein, whoheads theNew YorkCity Department of Edu-cation. Theacademicstaff isalso enthusiasticabout thepartnership.Teacherscanfocusonthebest way toeducate students, saysSouthBrooklyns principal, Vanda Belusic-Vollor.Thats huge!

Classes at South Brooklyn have 18 to 25students, as opposed to as many as 34 in thecitys large high schools. Students call theirteachers by their rst name. Because theschool runs on a trimester system, kids can

rackupcredits more quickly than theycouldat an ordinary high schoolpart of the planto keep themmovingbriskly toward gradua-tion day. The teachers favor a hands-on ap-proach; theresvery littlechalkand talk.Perezsays he used to hate U.S. history. In my oldschool,theyd justgiveyouapagenumberandtell you to answer questions in the text. AtSouth Brooklyn, he says, well study a courtcaseforaweek,andthesecondweek,weactitout. When its test time,you remember it.

Students are pushed toward New York

States demanding Regents diploma, whichmeans passing seven exams, and toward

age, undercredited kids were the bulk of thedropouts, says Leah Hamilton, executivedirector of the citys Ofce of Multiple Path-ways to Graduation. That turned out to bemorecorrectthananyonehadimagined:93%ofdropoutshadahistoryofbeingoverageandundercredited. In fact, once students fell intothis category, they had just a 19% chance of nishing high school or getting a graduateequivalencydiploma (ged) .

The groundbreaking studywhich isbeing emulated in Boston, Chicago and Port-land,Ore.wasfullofsurprises.Amongthemwas the sheer size of New Yorks problem:70,000 students from 16 to 21more thanone-fth of the citys high schoolpopulationwere twoor more years behindtheir peers in accumulating the 44 creditsneeded for graduation. An additional 68,000hadalready dropped out. Alltold, New Yorks138,000 lost and vulnerable kids made up apopulation larger than the combined publichighschoolenrollmentofPhiladelphia,Hous-

tonandBoston.Someof the biggest surprises in the midst

of this enormous crisis were the small brightspots.The study showedthata numberofex-istingprogramswere remarkably effective inpropelling dead-end students toward adiploma. Transfer schoolssmall, personal-ized high schools specially designed for kidswhohavefallenseriouslybehindhada56%graduation rate,comparedwith19%for suchhigh-risk kids at ordinary high schools, andsometransferschoolsweregraduating nearly

70%.Anotherprogram,YoungAdultBoroughCenters ( yabc s), which operates in the late af-

I didnt see myself hav-ing any kind of future. Iwould get some job Ihated and just survive. tanya garcia , who now expect sto graduate and attend college

Ernestine Maisonetovercamepersonalobstaclesand expects tograduate in June.

Lisa Syrianos, aYoungAdultBoroughCenterteacher, works withstudentCarlosOtero

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Posted through the courtesy of the Editors of Time Magazine 2008 Time Inc.

highereducation.Theymustparticipateinthecitys Learning to Work program, whichteaches employment skills, provides collegeandcareercounseling,andofferssubsidized in-ternships.Whilenoteveryoneloveshisorherinternship,Garciawas so inspiredbyherstintat a youth newspaper that she now hopes tostudyjournalismin college.

Most of the same elements are at work atthe yabc inLehmannHighSchoolintheBronx,where Maisonet spends her evenings. Thereare small classes led by dynamic teachers, aLearningtoWorkprogramandcloserelation-shipswithcounselors fromahealthandsocial-services group. The atmosphere here is a bitmore no-nonsense. The 250 students are allover 17, and many have weighty daytime re-sponsibilities.Theyhave kids athome.Someare pregnant. Some are homeless, says assis-tantprincipalMartinSmallhorne,anenergeticyoung administrator who works hard to cre-ate a personalized program inside one of thecityslargerandless intimatehigh schools.

The clock is ticking for his 310 students.The goal: get them to graduation before theyhit21andageoutofthesystem. yabcs stressef-cient scheduling. To attend, students musthave spent at least four years in high schooland have accumulated at least 17 credits.Their transcripts tend to be a mess, saysMichele Cahill, who helped create the Mul-tiple Pathways program and is now at theCarnegieCorporation.Studentsmightbemiss-ingthesecondhalfofalgebraandthreeyearsof physed. Ordinary highschools are not set up

to deal with these kinds of gaps,says Cahill,butagood yabc cansometimesgetthejobdoneina year. New datashowthatabout one-quar-ter ofstudents at yabcs andtransfer schools goontocollege.

Klein plans to greatly expand the numberof transfer schools and yabcs over theremaining2 1 2 years of MayorMichael Bloom-bergs administration. Replicating successfulprograms is always tricky, but in this casetheresapeculiarobstacle.Understate-andfed-eral-accountability rules, schools full of stu-dentswho dont graduate on time are labeledfailing. By that denition, yabcs and transferschools failnomatterhow brilliant a job theyare doing. Its hard to get partners to investand hard to attract strong leaders when theschool is labeled failing,saysHamilton .

NewYorkwillalsohave tostemthe tideof students who fall behind in the rst place.Ninthgradeisamajorpitfall. Parthenonfoundthat78%ofkidswhobecomeoverageandun-dercredited had to repeat freshman year. Onekey is improving reading skills in middleschoolachallengenationally.Lastyear37%of the citys eighth-graders were procient in

reading, up from30% in 2002 but still a longwayfromideal.Anotherkey, Kleinbelieves,iscontinuing to replace big, impersonal highschoolswith smaller schools that offera senseofcommunityand a variety ofprograms.SaysKlein:Youwanttocreateareallyrobustsetof options.

Providingmorechoicesispayingdividendsfor New York. In the past three years, the cityhas raised its on-time graduation rate from44%to50%,thoughhowstatesmeasuresuchgurescontinuestospur debate.Five-andsix-yeargraduationratesarealsoup.Wethinkitspowerfully important to increase all theserates,saysKlein.Itmaytakeakidacoupleof yearslonger,butifthekidgetsthediploma,theeconomicconsequencesarehuge.

Maisonet is thinking about a job in veteri-nary care andpossiblycollege,butwithout allthe support she has had at the yabc , itwontbeeasy to move on. When Maisonet suffered alate miscarriage in March, Smallhorne senttwo outreach staff members to nd her, andshe was backin schooltwoweeks later. Iloveyabc ,shesays.Theteacherssay,Comeon,youhave tograduatewe dontwant youhere nomore. But Im going tocry whenI leave.

Martin Smallhorne, head of a YoungAdultBorough Center, strives fora senseof community

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