Insights

Sarah was just a few months away from graduation. She was also in crisis.

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.

Twenty minutes.

That’s how long it took to determine that an incoming freshman named Ben was experiencing multiple “leading indicators” that suggested he would need additional support to graduate.

Twenty more minutes.

That’s how long it took to get him started on our ScholarCentric curriculum, which helps address these issues.

Seriously. That’s all it took to do something that research shows will have a tremendously big impact on Ben’s life.

It took 20 years of research to demonstrate that we can predict which students are going to struggle to graduate — but we can apply that research quite quickly.

As we travel across the nation, working with school leaders to give students more pathways to graduation, career training and college, one thing has become very clear: There aren’t many districts left that don’t already have multiple initiatives for helping students succeed.

 

You might be surprised by how many education leaders have a hard time answering what seems to be a very basic question about what they do: What’s the goal of education?

The reason, of course, is not because they don’t know what education is, but because education is not a single-focus endeavor. As educators, we’re not just trying to impart knowledge, we’re also trying to instill personal value, civic responsibility, success habits, and more.

How do you teach vital life skills like developing purpose, making goals, staying motivated in the face of adversity, self-efficacy, and social connectedness?

That’s a question we recently put to Dr. Scott Solberg, a professor of counseling psychology and applied human development at Boston University, and Graduation Alliance’s resident expert on social-emotional learning.

Jonathan didn’t know how to set goals.

 

That might seem strange to some folks — goal-setting is just a matter of picking something you want and going after it, right? But educators understand that, for many young people, attaching an objective to the steps needed to achieve that objective is as foreign as another language.

Jessica was a straight-A student. She always attended school. Her behavior was excellent.

But we knew she was at risk of dropping out.

 

We knew before her teachers knew. We knew before her parents knew. We even knew before Jessica knew.

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.