The Key to Secondary School Success: Getting 9th Grade Right
Contributing Author: Dr. Douglas Reeves
Kaaron Andrews has studied the relationship between 9th-grade student performance, graduation, and subsequent post-secondary success. She is the Director of the Center for High School Success. When they increase on-track 9th-grade rates, they are 3-4 times more likely to graduate from high school. It is the single strongest predictor of high school success – more than race, socioeconomic status, or even 8th-grade test scores. She contends that high schools are programmed for disconnection – disconnected from their peer group and from teachers who often have 150 students with whom they struggle to have a relationship.
While this conclusion may strike some readers as a blinding flash of the obvious, the reality is that in many educational systems the K-8 schools are completely divorced from the 9-12 systems. Sometimes these are in different districts, with different governing boards, superintendents, and curriculum leaders. When students attend only 80% of the time and are failing 1-2 classes, they can appear normal when, in fact, they are headed for failure. While these students appear to be relatively successful, they are therefore ignored. After all, just a few failures can be corrected with the pervasive use of credit recovery, right?
The key is that teachers have more control than they think, even with huge class sizes. It starts with understanding the root causes of failure. It’s the difference between “I’m just no good at math” and “I need help to be organized and get my work done during the school day.” The burden for student progress cannot just rely on teachers but on other students, many of whom had difficulties in organization and self-advocacy. Once students know that they are struggling, they can frequently feel that their requests for assistance are unwelcome.
The devil, as always, is in the details. So, here are some key details to improving high school success:
1 – Get the schedule right. This includes immediate academic support when there are signs of students struggling. After school doesn’t work, and summer school is futile. This may mean fewer periods – consistent with my previous research, which showed that schools with 8 or 9 periods per day underperformed those with 5-6 periods per day. By the way, consider our colleague, Ann McCarty Perez, on secondary school scheduling practices.
2 – Early analysis of student needs. This includes learning what students need to have for classes. The author quotes Desmond Tutu, who said, “We have to stop pulling out of the river and start understanding why they fell into the river in the first place.” Every investment in preventing failure, through early diagnosis and support, can save districts significant resources that might otherwise be wasted in credit recovery and alternative schools.
3 – Continuity and Persistence. Improvement requires 4-5 years of consistent implementation. This is the only way to show school leaders and policymakers that there is a return on investment. The same analysis must be applied to programs that are demonstrably ineffective. The example used in the interview is credit recovery programs, which can drain resources, sometimes allowing a student to sit at a computer for 3 hours rather than a semester at school. No school leader has ever been appreciated for the programs they cut, but failure to make necessary cuts is a prescription for financial disaster. With federal funding cutbacks and the evaporation of COVID-related funding, schools must make tough choices. Better to cut 100% of ineffective programs rather than across-the-board cuts, leaving teachers and administrators with insufficient resources to implement the programs that have the greatest potential to support student success.
4 – Be open to data that you do not want to see. That includes not only scores, but also what students and teachers have to say. The culture of schools does not always appreciate how students can tell the truth about what is really happening in schools. The late Grant Wiggins pioneered the process for “following a student” – eat where they eat, sit where they sit, do the homework that is required of them. He concluded that many secondary school students lead lives of crushing boredom, and yet we wonder why they are not motivated to cheerfully follow instructions.
Here’s the link:
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