Graduation Alliance wants to say “thanks”! From border to border and coast to coast, Graduation Alliance has worked in partnership with hundreds of school districts to help students develop social-emotional learning skills, re-engage after dropping out, make college and career plans, and obtain workforce certifications. And if there’s one thing we’ve noticed in nearly every
Graduation Alliance started and thrives with the passion for having students reach their full potential. It all started with a simple premise: Give individuals who could not or would not return to high school the opportunity to take classes online, supported by expert teachers, professional tutors and academic coaches. The American Academy, one of the
These tests and tools for predicting at-risk students may put us out of the dropout recovery business. Thank goodness. For nearly a decade, Graduation Alliance has worked with school districts across the nation to re-engage dropped out students and support those who are still enrolled but acutely at risk of leaving school. Last year, we
Antonio was doing fine. That’s what it looked like from the perspective of his teachers’ gradebooks, at least. He was doing most of his work, most of the time. He was earning Bs and Cs in all of his classes, and hadn’t failed a single course since entering high school three years earlier. But something
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. In short,
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. But
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. How? Because Jessica’s school district had collected some vital pieces of information from all
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
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. In our work with school leaders across the nation, though, we’ve heard again and again that these metrics can be hard