An Education Week article reports that schools significantly improved absenteeism and course failure rates after two years of intentionally building robust systems to get at-risk students back on track early, according to a new report that analyzes data from more than 50 schools.
These schools saw a 32% drop in course failures and a 28% decrease in chronic absenteeism, according to the report.
In 2023, dozens of schools piloted retooled, relationship-centered strategies to help students as part of a program through the GRAD Partnership, a coalition of 12 organizations that partner with schools to carry out implementation of student-success systems.
With two full years of data, project leaders say the results are “encouraging.” Students from reporting schools are missing fewer days and failing fewer classes. Positive results continue to grow each year, as the schools deepen their work, says Robert Balfanz, the director of the Everyone Graduates Center at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education. Balfanz has worked with schools on connectedness strategies through the GRAD Partnership.
“We’ve seen schools are able to see benefits in the first year, and then they see added benefits by working on it longer and adding more components,” Balfanz says. “
“Student-success systems” are the “next generation” of earlier interventions such as multitiered systems of support and early-warning systems, Balfanz says. Data points such as academics and attendance identify at-risk students and target increasingly extensive interventions depending on individual levels of need.
Student-success systems also use information about school climate, social-emotional learning, and students’ sense of connectedness. These data point are measured by recurring surveys that ask if students feel known and supported by adults and classmates.
Student-support teams review the data to flag concerns and to identify students who need targeted attention.
In addition to traditional methods such as academic tutoring, student-success teams may use new approaches to build school connectedness. These include encouraging at-risk students to become involved in extracurricular activities or partnering students with peers who share similar interests.
Research suggests students have better results in school if they believe that there is an adult who cares about them, their work has value, and they feel welcome.
Participating schools are seeing the benefits of this intervention, according to the report.
Schools, on average, experienced a two-year decline in chronic absenteeism of 8 percentage points (a 28% decline) for grades in which they implemented student-success systems with GRAD Partnership support.
In the schools’ middle and high school grades, the chronic absenteeism rate declined, on average, from 34% to 30%, according to the report.
These improvements show the benefits of streamlining student-support teams, Balfanz says. Many schools use a mix of different teams to monitor various aspects of students’ performance and behavior — attendance-monitoring teams, mental health teams and academics teams, he says. This makes it hard to catch patterns of behavior that might warrant an intervention, before problems become larger, he says.
“This is making the case that if you bring all of these little teams together into one big student-success team, you could probably get more done,” he says.
Education Week
