We haven’t ever literally shouted it from the rooftops, but in our quest to raise awareness of the need to support over-aged and under-credited students — especially those who have left school or are at risk of doing so — we’ve done pretty much everything short of that.
When it comes to student dropouts, recovery is only the first step. Students who re-enroll are not guaranteed to stay engaged through graduation. Successful programs not only entice students withflexibility and support, they also motivate students with an engaging curriculum. One way to increase engagement and retention is through a rewards program.
Conventional thinking would suggest that students who drop out of high school don’t want to be in school. However, our research shows that 91 percent of students eligible for re-enrollment programs actually do have a desire to graduate.
So, what is preventing them from returning on their own? While every student has a unique set of circumstances for dropping out, most of those reasons fall under one of three categories of life challenges: academic performance, social/familial pressures and responsibilities, or mental/physical health.
The common stereotype of high school dropouts as lazy, disengaged and disinterested in improving their lives couldn’t be further from the truth.
Our research suggests that 91 percent of individuals who have left school before graduation say they want to re-enroll. So why aren’t dropout recovery programs more effective at recruiting students? A large part of the problem is that many dropouts are not aware these programs exist, and many school districts are not well equipped to contact hard-to-reach students. Here are some of the best-practice strategies that we’ve honed at Graduation Alliance:
Recovering student dropouts is no easy task. Never mind the complexities of creating a dropout recovery program, the recruitment process alone is fraught with obstacles that can ground a school district initiative before it even has a chance to succeed. But with proper planning, student re-engagement programs can bring students back into a learning environment and put them on the path to graduation. To make that journey possible, three challenges must be overcome:
When a school district successfully intervenes and changes the course of an at-risk student, it benefits the community in multiple ways.
During the time it will take you to read this blog post, more than 35 students will drop out of high school. This back-of-the-napkin estimate is based on my assumption that you have faster than average reading skills, and on the cold, hard truth that approximately 18,000 students drop out of high school every day.
President John Adams once said “Facts are stubborn things.” And when it comes to the stats surrounding high school dropouts and the financial and social ramifications they have on our country, the facts are most certainly stubborn.
In a 2014 article, Politico gleefully proclaimed that the national graduation rate could hit 90% by 2020.
One of the best books I’ve read in the past two years is Robert Putnam’s Our Kids. Putnam deals head-on with the emerging “opportunity gap” in America. He offers a personal and authoritative look at this new American crisis, beginning with the example of his high school class of 1959 in Port Clinton, Ohio.