Insights

Imagine a map of the United States, lit up with little dots everywhere a Graduation Alliance student is actively working on one of his or her online classes.

Wow. The response to our campaign to share some easy-to-monitor indicators for potentially at-risk students is going far better than we could have expected. Across the country, educators have been asking for our new tip sheet, and engaging with us about their ideas for how to better “see” potentially at-risk students before they’re even at-risk.

It’s common sense, really: Students who habitually eke out passing grades in middle school and the early years of high school are more likely to fail to receive credit in a class down the road.

And in periods in which the incidence of dropping out increases — the junior and senior cohort years — a failure to earn credit for a class can be a major factor in a student’s decision to leave school before graduation.

Research demonstrates that socioeconomic factors, the strength of parental relationships, non-cognitive skills development, and the presence of adult responsibilities in a student’s life can all be predictive of a student’s chances of dropping out.

Sometimes, the students who leave school before graduation are predictable. They’re the single mothers with no family support. They’re the young men who have been in trouble with the law. In at least one way, the stark challenges of their lives actually make our jobs as educators easier — it’s not hard to know that students in these sorts of situations will need additional support to get to graduation day.

We have yet to meet a school leader who wouldn’t like his or her district to be better connected to former students. We have also never met someone who tried to do so without experiencing quite a bit of frustration.

Even in today’s vastly interconnected world, it’s remarkably easy to lose contact with people. Folks move. Phone numbers change. Social media trends come and go.

You can learn anything and everything about people online. That’s what society seems to be telling us these days, at least.

But after a decade of helping school districts locate, re-enroll, re-engage and educate disengaged students, we’ve learned that sometimes the internet can’t even help us find missing students. And in talking to the school leaders we work with across the nation, we heard a separate but similar concern; often, when they go looking for alumni for the purpose of understanding long-term outcomes, they simply can’t find their former students.

First impressions are lasting impressions. And when it comes to connecting with graduates in a way that makes it easier to monitor longitudinal outcomes (and easier to recover students who leave before graduation, too) lasting impressions are vital.

So how do you start building those sorts of impressions? By thinking about a school’s “brand.”

Camilla’s school district had exactly what she needed: A program that offered the flexibility and support that would be vital to getting the single, working, teenaged mother to graduation day. And Camilla was ready for it: Like most individuals who leave school before graduation, she desperately wanted to come back, but she just didn’t know how.

The majority of students who leave school before graduation are in their late teens when they drop out. The majority of states in our nation will fund schooling for students who are actively engaged in an effort to earn a diploma through their early 20s — and some will fund students even longer than that.