When I was working as a principal, my staff and I knew the importance of students getting off to a good start. For the most part, the kids made it easy. After a summer off, most were anxious to socialize, show their stuff, and make a good impression on their classmates and teachers. Many, particularly those for whom school wasn’t easy, were looking for a second chance, a way to break from the failures and disappointments of the past.  

I learned to work with my staff to conduct a review of first term report cards, especially those of ninth graders. We knew instinctively that students who were beginning to show a pattern of absences, or were failing a core course or two, were most likely to fall by the wayside.  Not surprisingly, the number of discipline incidents always spiked as the first report card appeared. I went to the Excedrin bottle more regularly when students lapsed back into old patterns, slowed down by family issues or gaps in their skills. We knew they would need a menu of special ingredients – honest talk, tough love, inviting adults who cared, family conferences, an advocate, a daily check-in system, literacy and homework help, and more time in school.

The phenomenon of struggling students I describe lies at the heart of a profound national crisis – our ever-increasing dropout rates and the concomitant climb in the numbers of struggling 18-25 year-olds in our society. Endemic poverty, violence, the ossified systems and methods of our secondary schooling models – all of these factors contribute to the student disengagement that eventually leads to leaving school altogether. In almost every city, dropout rates are near or beyond the 50% mark. “First-chance” high schools in most urban districts don’t stand a chance as they exist today, and instead comprise the “drop-out factories” so clearly portrayed by the work of Johns Hopkins’ Bob Balfanz, the Youth Transition Funders, the Consortium on Chicago School Research, and others.  

To have one of every two students leaving through the back door portends a bleak future for everyone in our democracy, regardless of social or economic status. Leaving school before completion too often leads to a life on the economic margins, a greater likelihood of incarceration, poor mental and physical health, and out-of-wedlock births. Legislation recently re-introduced in Congress setting a uniform graduation rate starts to position schools to honestly assess their challenges and strengths. Elected officials have begun to call for action and researchers have begun to lay bare the causal ingredients in a more formal way.

We know that dropping out is not an “event”, but a series of frustrations, repeated patterns of failure, and poorly executed transitions from grade to grade, school to school, and teacher to teacher. We know the predictors and early indicators, and that schools show little capacity to intervene in these persistent patterns of failure. Despite what the architecture of traditional schools suggests, kids are different from one another – from family histories to financial and social statuses to learning needs and styles – and that those differences become more, not less, profound, as they move up through the system.

We also recognize clearly-identified prototypes among our struggling students: limited-English-speaking students arriving in high school, many with interrupted educational histories; older high school students with only a few specific classes left but with debilitating family situations and/or work needs; and over-age middle-school age students who have already fallen off-track due to academic and emotional challenges. 60% of these young people are destined to drop out early in their high school careers.  

The good news is that we already know how to design and build schools that can support young people more effectively. Examples exist around the country, especially in New York, Portland and Boston, cities that began several years ago to address the dropout problem. These schools operate on differing extended schedules, with an array of on–site support services, many of which are provided by outside collaborators and feature a range of instructional and literacy approaches guided by research and promising practice.  

We need a more concerted approach to stem the tide of student disengagement. We need our most challenged districts to offer a portfolio of schooling options designed to serve struggling youth, not add-on programs layered over a traditional school template, and not computer-based “credit recovery” centers. These schools will need more resources, both financial and human. They will need to be diploma-granting institutions --safe, supportive, yet challenging intellectual and social homes-away-from-homes-- places that can thoughtfully connect students to workforce development programs, step-up initiatives and 13th programs. And they will need greater autonomy and a differentiated accountability framework. Thinking in terms of 5- and 6-year cohort graduation rates would more accurately reflect the complexities of the problem. (The work of Richard Rothstein suggests other possibilities.)  

Together, we need to encourage more ongoing local conversations about who attends our schools, what their needs are, and how all of us –parents, educators, community members and students themselves – can and must play a role. The size of the challenge is equaled by the size of the opportunity presented to re-think our schools.