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This page is a resource for the Pennsylvania Department of Education and participating schools who are working to implement Early Warning Systems within their school or district.  This page has some national resources at the top and then is divided by Professional Development module.  Click on the module below to be taken directly to resources.

1. EWS Overview, Background Research
2. Tiered Intervention 101
3. EWI Meetings, Setup, Practice
4. Root Cause for & Strategic Levels of Intervention
5. Summing Up and Next Steps

 

The Everyone Graduates Center is a unit of the Johns Hopkins University School of Education. Learn more about the Everyone Graduates Center here.

Grad Nation

For more information about Building a Grad Nation and the Civic Marshall Plan, click here.

• Grad Nation: A Guidebook to Help Communities Tackle the Dropout Crisis
• Grad Nation Community Guidebook provides roadmap for communities and states
• Building a Grad Nation: Civic Marshall Plan (CMP) State Indices
• Building a Grad Nation: 2013-2014 Update

Reports, Presentations, and Publications

• Beyond the Indicators: An Integrated School-Level Approach to Dropout Prevention,
• Using Data to Keep All Students On-Track for Graduation: Team Playbook
• The Importance of Being in School: A Report on Absenteeism in the Nation’s Public Schools
• An Early Warning System
• On Track for Success: The Use of Early Warning Indicator and Intervention Systems to Build a Grad Nation
• What Your Community Can Do to End Its Dropout Crisis

 

UChicago CCSR is a unit of the University of Chicago Urban Education Institute. Learn more about the Chicago Consortium of School Research here.

• Preventable Failure: Improvements in Long-Term Outcomes When High Schools Focused on the Ninth Grade Year: Research Summary
• Free to Fail or On-track to College: Why Grades drop when students enter high school and what adults can do about it

 

The mission of IES is to provide rigorous and relevant evidence on which to ground education practice and policy and share this information broadly. By identifying what works, what doesn’t, and why, IES aims to improve educational outcomes for all students, particularly those at risk of failure. The research arm of the U.S. Department of Education, by law activities must be free of partisan political influence. Learn more here.

• Institute of Education Sciences (2008). IES Practice Guide: Dropout Prevention

 

The Center’s mission is to help states and other CCRS stakeholders better inform, align, and support efforts to ensure that all students are ready for success in college and careers. Learn more about the CCRS Center at AIR here.

• High School Early Warning Intervention Monitoring System Implementation Guide (2012)

 

Tools, resources, implementation guides

• Using Data to keep on Students on Track for Graduation: Team Playbook

• Middle Grades Matters Field Guide

• Sample ABC Data and Tracker

• National High School Center Early Warning System (EWS) Implementation Guide

• Massachusetts Department of Education EWS Implementation guide

Organizations

• Data Quality Campaign (DQC)  Launched in 2005 by 10 founding partners, DQC leads a partnership of nearly 100 organizations committed to realizing the vision of an education system in which all stakeholders—from parents to policymakers—are empowered with high-quality data from the early childhood, K–12, postsecondary, and workforce systems to make decisions that ensure every student graduates high school prepared for success in college and the workplace. To achieve this vision, DQC supports state policymakers and other key leaders to promote the effective use of data to improve student achievement.

• Attendance Works is a national and state initiative that promotes awareness of the important role that school attendance plays in achieving academic success starting with school entry. Our goal is to ensure that every district in the country not only tracks chronic absence data beginning in kindergarten or ideally earlier, but also partners with families and community agencies to intervene when attendance is a problem for children or particular schools.

• Consortium on Chicago School Research – University of Chicago The University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research builds the capacity for school reform by conducting research that identifies what matters for student success and school improvement.

• College Readiness Indicator System (CRIS): a joint effort of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform (AISR)and the John W. Gardner Center (JGC) at Stanford University, and is generously funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. We are working with five sites to help develop, expand and modify current college readiness indicator systems that identify and support young people to be college ready.

Research Studies

• An Early Warning System (Balfanz, Nield, Herzog, 2007)

• On Track for Success: The Use of Early Warning Indicator and Intervention Systems to Build a Grad Nation

• The Importance of Being in School: A Report on Absenteeism in the Nation’s Public Schools

• What Factors Predict High School Graduation in the Los Angeles Unified School District? Silver, D., Saunders, M. and Zarate, E. California Dropout Research Project. (2008).

• Sent Home and Put Off-Track: The Antecedents, Disproportionalities and Consequences of Being Suspended in the Ninth Grade

• Research Brief: Five key findings for Middle Grades from Looking Forward To High School and College, University of Chicago – CCSR, 2014

• Beyond the indicators:  An integrated approach to dropout prevention.  Webinar presented for the Mid-Atlantic Equity Center, Arlington, VA. Mac Iver, D.J. & Mac Iver, M.A.  (2009, June)

• Advancing the “Colorado Graduates” agenda:   Understanding the dropout problem and mobilizing to meet the graduation challenge. Denver, CO:  Colorado Children’s Campaign. Mac Iver, M.A.  & Balfanz, R., and Byrnes, V. (2009).

• Transforming Teaching and Learning through Data-Driven Decision Making Ellen B. Mandinach and Sharnell S. Jackson

Tools, resources, implementation guides

• Tiered Intervention Posters

• Intervention Sample List

Organizations

• The National Center for School Engagement was established based on over a decade of educational research conducted by Colorado Foundation for Families and Children. NCSE has generated many resources about school attendance, attachment, and achievement . NCSE provides training and technical assistance, research and evaluation to school districts, law enforcement agencies, courts, as well as state and federal agencies — to name a few.

• Gallup Student Poll: A landmark new measure that captures the youth voice, a critical but too often missing part of the national dialogue surrounding student performance and success. The Gallup Student Poll tracks the hope, engagement, and wellbeing of students in grades 5 through 12 across the United States.

• 5 Essentials: The 5E system reliably measures changes in school organization through its survey, predicts school success through scoring, and provides individualized actionable reports to schools, districts, parents, and community partners, and training to school leadership and teachers.

Research Studies

• Teach Me, I Dare You! Judith Allen Brough, Sherrel Bergmann, Larry C. Holt – Eye on Education, 2006

• No Excuses: Lessons from 21 High-Performing, High-Poverty Schools Samuel Casey Carter – The Heritage Foundation, 2000

• Classroom Instruction that Works: Research-based strategies for increasing student achievement Marzano, Pickering & Pollock, 2001

Tools, resources, implementation guides

• The Culturally Proficient School: An Implementation Guide for School Leaders, 2^nd Edition  Randall B. Lindsey, Laraine M. Roberts, and Franklin Campbell Jones

Research Studies

• Leading Every Day: Actions for Effective Leadership, 3^rd Edition. Joyce Kaser, Susan Mundry, Katherine E. Stiles and Susan Loucks-Horsley

• Nine Lessons of Successful School Leadership Teams: Distilling a Decade of Innovation. Bill McKeever and the California School Leadership Academy at Wested

PD Module #4 – Root cause for & strategic levels of intervention

Tools, resources, implementation guides

• When My Child is Disciplined at School, available at gaappleseed.org (also available in Spanish).

Research Studies

• Beyond the Indicators: An Integral School-Level Approach to Dropout Prevention

• Effective School Discipline: Keeping Kids in Class: An Assessment of Georgia’s Public School Discipline Policies, Practices and Procedures and Outcomes, A report in association with Just Georgia-Building Justice and Safety for Children, 2011

• Young men of color: Boosting the Life Chances of Young Men of Color: Evidence from Promising Programs. Christopher Wimer and Dan Bloom, June, 2014, MDRC

• Preventable Failure: Improvements in Long Term Outcomes when High Schools Focused on the Ninth Grade Year (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research, 2014) CCSR: M. Roderick, T.Kelley-Kemple, D.W. Johnson, and N.O. Beachum.

• How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character. Paul Tough, Random House, 2013

• Free to Fail or on Track to College: Why Grades Drop When Students Enter HS and What Adults Can Do About This.

• Whistling Vivaldi and Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do. Claude Steele, 2010 Review of the book here: http://hepg.org/her-home/issues/harvard

 

• Are we closing the School Discipline Gap? Daniel Losen, Cheri Hodson, Michael A. Keith II, Katrina Morrison, Shakti Belway, February 23, 2015

Tools, resources, implementation guides

• What Your Community Can Do to End Its Dropout Crisis

• How Can We Change What We Are Doing as Adults?

• Motivation to Learn: Transforming Classroom Culture to Support Student Achievement. Michael Middleton and Kevin Perks

• Talking Back: what students know about teaching. By the students of Leadership High School in conjunction with 826 Valencia

• Practical Case Studies: National Forum to Accelerate Middle Grades Reform

• Scarcity: Why Having too Little Means so Much. Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, Times Books, 2013