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.

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.

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.