A Practical Guide to Turning Around Low Performing Secondary Schools

California League of Schools

K-12 Annual Conference-South

Robert Balfanz

Everyone Graduates Center

School of Education

Johns Hopkins University

What Does it Take to Put All Students on the Graduation Path?

We are at the start of what promises and needs to be a transformational decade in American Public Education

Common college and career ready standards

Next generation assessments

Individual level longitudinal data

Smart integration of technology

Advancements in Teacher Quality

Holds promise of revolutionary improvements

But millions of students are still attending high-poverty schools where

Achievement gaps become achievement chasms

High school graduation is not the norm

Few high school graduates complete college

This Can Not Continue

There is no work for young adults without a high school degree

And no work to support a family without some post-secondary schooling or training

As a result entire communities are being cut off from participation in American society and a shot at the American Dream

If learning is inherently joyful and exciting, and students want to succeed, why do we have these outcomes?

Because by and large the schools they attend are not designed or organized to meet the educational challenges they face

Three Hypotheses on Why

We underestimate the degree or nature of these schools educational challenge

We do not design schools attuned to the developmental needs of students in general and students who live in poverty in particular

We do not integrate efforts to make attending school worthwhile with efforts to make schools places where students and teachers want to be and want to work hard

This Needs to inform our Approach to Putting All Students on the Graduation Path

Need to design schools that can meet the educational challenge they face

Need to organize the day to day operations of the school so they propels students to attend, behave, and try and enable the adults in the school to believe that the challenge of preparing all students for college and career is doable

Need to build students and school staffs capacity to persevere, adapt and collaborate

Case Study of the Middle Grades: Is this where the Challenge will be won or lost?

The 9th grades in the nations lowest performing high schools are filled with students both lacking a good middle grades education and who have learned in the middle grades that schooling as they experience it might not be for them.

Students Middle Grades Experience and in Particular the Extent to which they are able to regularly attend school, behave, learn to try hard, and do well in their courses (the ABCs of Post-Secondary Success) greatly shapes their educational trajectories, particularly in high poverty environments.

Future Dropouts can be readily identified in significant numbers as early as 6th grade

Robert Balfanz and Liza Herzog, Johns Hopkins University; Philadelphia Education Fund

The Primary Off-Track Indicators for Potential Dropouts:

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