The Community Guidebook is part of the Grad Nation campaign, a large and growing movement of dedicated individuals, organizations, and communities working together to raise the national high school graduation rate to 90 percent by 2020 and return the U.S. to first in the world in college completion. It is authored by Robert Balfanz and Joanna Hornig Fox from the Everyone Graduates Center and by John M. Bridgeland and Mary Bruce of Civic Enterprises with support from AT&T. It adds to existing sources of knowledge and information on the high school dropout crisis, such as the annual Building a Grad Nation report and the Building a Grad Nation Summit.

”The nation’s progress rests with how well communities are doing at providing productive opportunities and support for children and young people,” said John Gomperts, president and CEO, America’s Promise Alliance.

“The Grad Nation Community Guidebook compiles the best thinking and proven tools to strengthen efforts to raise graduation rates, whether a community is deeply engaged in the issue already or just getting started.”

The Community Guidebook compiles current research and outlines proven solutions and best practices including school and community interventions, for raising graduation rates. It provides a comprehensive framework to help communities design local dropout prevention efforts. It contains 16 tools to help communities determine their actual graduation rate and dropout profile, establish an early warning system and attendance tracker, analyze student and school performance and conduct an assessment of individual and organizational assets and the current policy landscape.

“This Community Guidebook is the go-to resource for communities seeking to energize individuals, businesses and community partners to rally around students who are at risk of dropping out of high school,” said Charlene Lake, AT&T senior vice president for Public Affairs and chief sustainability officer.

“AT&T is pleased to join with America’s Promise and hundreds of Grad Nation partners to support inventive tools like this that help move us closer to ending the dropout crisis.”

The Community Guidebook also addresses other important issues such as education reform, school transformation, Common Core State Standards, multiple pathways to graduation and offering a challenging curriculum that recognizes the needs of a knowledge-based economy, as well as the importance of quality out-of-school opportunities, social-emotional learning and soft skills development. It also provides communities with a blueprint on how to engage youth as part of the solution and develop their own “Dropout Prevention and Graduation Improvement Team” and “Community Graduation Compact” as guideposts for building and tracking their progress.

“This has been the most widely used Grad Nation tool since we launched the campaign. The updated, online version is now accessible to every educator, community member, and parent across the country, which will help schools and communities address their dropout challenges,” said John Bridgeland, Community Guidebook co-author and CEO of Civic Enterprises.

The Community Guidebook is free and available at guidebook.americaspromise.org with ready-to-print tools and links to other online resources. It will be featured at the upcoming Grad Nation Community Summits, a series of community level events that will bring together leaders from all sectors to examine local data, identify what’s working and where there are challenges and explore promising practices and proven solutions to support young people in and out of school. With AT&T’s support, 100 Grad Nation Community Summits will be held over the next several years with the first 15 in late 2013. Confirmed first-round Summit locations include: Birmingham, AL; Jackson, MS; Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN; Providence, RI; Toledo, OH and Tucson, AZ.

The 2013 Building a Grad Nation report found that for the first time the nation is on track to meet the goal of 90 percent national graduation rate by the class of 2020. The report found the national high school graduation rate increased 6.5 percentage points since 2001 with an average growth of 1.25 percentage points each year from 2006-2010 to 78.2 percent.

See more information at the White House website.

Robert Balfanz, a senior research scientist at The Johns Hopkins University, is among 10 education leaders named White House “Champions of Change” for their commitment to furthering education among African Americans.

He will be honored in ceremonies this afternoon at The White House. To watch the event live, visit http://www.whitehouse.gov/live at 4:30 p.m. ET on Tuesday, Feb. 26.

Balfanz is a national expert who focuses on America’s dropout crisis, chronic absenteeism and the warning signs that show as early as sixth grade which students are likely to drop out of high school. He works with low-performing schools across the country, many in high-poverty neighborhoods, through Talent Development Secondary, a comprehensive school improvement model created at the university’s Center for Social Organization of Schools.

“My professional work has revolved around figuring out what it will take to enable all our students to graduate from high school prepared for adult success,” Balfanz wrote in a blog prepared for the White House website. “It is driven by the belief that . . . far too many of our students, especially students of color who live in poverty, fail to graduate from high school. It is an affront to what America can and needs to be.”

Balfanz is a professor at the university’s School of Education and is a co-director of the Everyone Graduates Center. He is also the founder and director of Diplomas Now, a national model for school improvement that combines the work of three nonprofit organizations in some of the nation’s most challenging schools in 12 cities. In 2010, Diplomas Now was awarded a federal $30 million Investing in Innovation grant to expand the program and evaluate its effects.

The Champions of Change program was created as a part of President Obama’s Winning the Future initiative. The White House regularly features individuals, businesses and organizations that are doing extraordinary things to empower and inspire members of their communities.

“President Obama has made providing a complete and competitive education for all Americans – from cradle to career – a top priority,” said Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett in a statement released by The White House. “This week, we look forward to welcoming Champions of Change who have been working to ensure that all African American students receive an education that fully prepares them for high school graduation, college completion, and productive careers.”

My professional work has revolved around figuring out what it will take to enable all our students to graduate from high school prepared for adult success. It has been driven by a belief that our current outcomes, in which far too many of our students, especially students of color who live in poverty, fail to graduate from high school. That is an affront to what America can and needs to be. The good news is that for the first time in forty years, the nation’s high school graduation rate is improving, and at a significant rate. Over the past four years the graduation rate has increased by five percentage points. Those gains, moreover, have been driven by improvements in the graduation rates of African American and Latino students, the very students for whom the dropout crisis has been the most acute. Much work, however, remains in order to insure that all students have the educational experiences and supports they need to graduate from high school prepared for college and career. This is essential because there is no work in the 21st century to support a family for young adults without high school diplomas.

The challenge that remains for African American students is that currently even with the progress of the past five years, one in three does not graduate with their class and one in four attends a high school where graduation is not the norm. About 11 percent of high schools, 1,400 in number, produce half of the nation’s African American and Latino dropouts. Nearly all these high schools, in turn, educate students who live in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty. To move forward, we must organize our efforts, not only to turn around these schools, and insure they provide a quality education that prepares their students for success in the 21st century, but also to insure that the students within them have the supports they need to overcome the challenges of poverty. Poverty makes it more difficult for students in the nation’s low graduation rate high schools to come to school every day, pay attention in class, and get their school work done. Yet our research and that of others shows that the best teachers and most evidence-based curricula will have muted impacts if students are not able to attend, focus, and try.

Fortunately, it is being demonstrated more and more that the hungry bear of poverty can be pushed back. Whole school instructional and teaching improvements can be combined with enhanced, and through early warning systems, better-targeted student supports provided by a growing number of non-profits and community organizations using evidence-based strategies, to keep many more students on the path to high school graduation. Our Diplomas Now program, for example, is showing that chronic absenteeism, behavioral struggles, and course failures in our most challenged middle and high schools can be reduced by at least half.

Yet to truly provide all students who live in poverty with reliable pathways to adult success bolder action is needed. We need an innovation competition to redesign middle and high school so that it will be routine for students who live in high-poverty communities to take and succeed in high school credit bearing classes in 8th grade, and college credit bearing classes in 12th grade. This will provide students with direct experience with the expectations of the next level of schooling, while still providing the familiarity and support of their current school, where they are seen as the most advanced, rather than the least experienced, students. This is critical because we know it is in the transition years, 6th grade, 9th grade and the first year of college when most of our high-poverty students fall off the path to high school graduation and post-secondary success. As importantly, this would enable students to complete college in three years, which means financial aid can be spread over fewer years, increasing the amount available each year.

Finally, and this might be the best part, what would have been the fourth year of college can be used as a year of community and national service (in exchange for enhanced financial aid), in the highest-needs schools to provide the person power needed to give students the tutoring, mentoring, role models, nagging, and nurturing they will need to overcome the challenges of poverty and succeed in more demanding courses.

There is one final component that will be required. It was driven home to me during a visit to a school we work with in Chicago. The ninth grade class was reading A House on Mango Street, and the teacher, as a discussion prompt, asked students if they could, would they leave their neighborhood and if so why. Almost all said they would, and almost every one of them said, in one way or another, it was because of their near daily exposure to violence. Part of me at that moment felt that instead of seeking to improve the school, we should be organizing an evacuation. But then one student said it was only worth leaving if the violence did not follow them. What we need to acknowledge is that within the subset of schools that drive the dropout crisis, there is a further subset, which needs to take on a therapeutic role. They need to both help students cope and overcome the negative and often crippling aspects of exposure to violence and show that alternatives to violence exist.

The truth is, in our most poverty-ridden neighborhoods, the public school is often the only societal institution with a physical presence. It needs to offer more than just academic instruction; it needs to provide students with the academic and non-academic experience and supports they need to thrive. But at the moment these schools do not have the resources for this mission. We need to become much better at integrating the funds and efforts housed in other city, state, and federal social service and justice agencies, usually disconnected from the schools, into a set of preventative, therapeutic, and wraparound supports provided in the schools in our most challenged neighborhoods.

While progress is encouraging, a deeper look at the data reveals that gains in graduation rates and declines in dropout factory high schools occurred unevenly across states and subgroups of students (e.g. economically disadvantaged, African American, Hispanic, students with disabilities, and students with limited English proficiency). As a result, large “graduation gaps” remain in many states among students of different races, ethnicities, family incomes, disabilities and limited English proficiencies. To repeat the growth in graduation rates in the next ten years experienced in the second half of the last decade, and to ensure progress for all students, the nation must turn its attention to closing the graduation gap by accelerating progress for student subgroups most affected by the dropout crisis.

This report outlines the progress made and the challenges that remain. Part 1: The Data analyzes the latest graduation rates and “dropout factory” trends at the state and national levels. Part 2: Progress and Challenge provides an update on the nation’s shared efforts to implement the Civic Marshall Plan to reach the goal of at least a 90 percent high school graduation rate for the Class of 2020 and all classes that follow. Part 3: Paths Forward offers recommendations on how to accelerate our work and achieve our goals, with all students prepared for college and career. The report also offers “snapshots” within schools, communities, and organizations from Orlando to Oakland that are making substantial gains in boosting high school graduation rates.

Download the 2012/2013 Update – Building a Grad Nation Executive summary, available here in pdf, and the Full Report, available here in pdf.

Read the full white paper, available here in pdf.

Within the past decade, public investments and private donors have sought to remake the high school in various ways: by organizing high schools around unifying themes, creating improved curricula for students who enter high school underprepared, developing standards and end-of-course exams, breaking larger high schools into smaller units, and creating small autonomous schools.

Despite this flurry of activity, there has been relatively little discussion about the role of Career and Technical schools in preparing students to enter higher education and the workforce.  More than 90 percent of the approximately 18,000 public high schools in the United States offer some type of career and technical education course.  However, for approximately 900 high schools known as “career and technical high schools” (CTE schools), workforce preparation is the central and primary mission.  In 2002, career and technical high schools enrolled approximately nine percent of the in-school population of tenth grade students in the United States.

A result of the lack of research focus to CTE schools (as opposed to just CTE courses taken at any type of school) is that there has been no gathering of evidence on the effects of CTE schools on a variety of student outcomes, including academic achievement, labor market outcomes, and postsecondary enrollment.  This report provides a basic questions about academic outcomes associated with CTE schools:

• What is the effect of CTE schools on educational attainment, specifically credit accumulation, grade promotion, and graduation?

• What is the effect of CTE schools on college-preparatory course taking in mathematics, science, and foreign language?

• What effect do CTE schools have on academic performance, specifically grade point average (GPA), and academic growth in mathematics and reading comprehension?

This report presents findings from a case study of five CTE schools in the School District of Philadelphia.  Three cohorts of students – the Classes of 2003, 2004, and 2005 – are the focus of this report.  Students in these cohorts were admitted to the CTE schools through a lottery that admitted students through random selection, taking into account student race/ethnicity in order to achieve court-ordered racial balance in the schools.  This study takes advantage of this so-called “natural experiment” by comparing outcomes for applicants who were admitted with those for students who did not receive an acceptance.  Two types of estimates are created for each outcome: 1) an Intent-to-Treat estimate, which compares outcomes for students who were accepted to CTE schools to outcomes for students who were not accepted, and 2) a Dosage estimate, which compares students who attended a CTE school to students who did not attend.

Key findings include:

• CTE schools had higher on-time graduation rates in each of the three cohorts.  This CTE advantage continued to five-year graduation rates for the two cohorts for which these data were available and to the six-year graduation rates for the one cohort for which data were available (13-27% increase in individual’s odds of graduating using ITT estimate and 111-183% increase using Dosage estimate).  Likewise, there were CTE impacts on total credits earned (0.7 – .0.8 credits with ITT estimate, and 5.9 – 6.6 credits with Dosage estimate) and total CTE courses taken (0.33-0.38 with ITT estimate, and 2.30-2.34 with Dosage estimate).

• CTE schools had a substantial impact on the probability of successfully completing the college preparatory mathematics sequence of Algebra 1, Algebra 2, and Geometry.  The Intent-to-Treat estimates placed the odds of completing this course sequence as one-quarter to one-third greater for CTE students (25-32% increase in the odds of completing the sequence), while the Dosage estimates placed the odds for CTE attenders as between two and three times as great as for those who attended other schools (232-255% increase in odds of completing mathematics course sequence).

• The Intent-to-Treat and Dosage estimates of impact for completing both Chemistry and Physics credits were inconsistent across cohorts and often not statistically significant. 

• The Intent-to-Treat estimates of impact for earning two course credits in foreign language was inconsistent across cohorts.  However, the Dosage estimate indicated a substantial CTE impact (145-148% increase in odds of completing foreign language course sequence), with those who attended CTE schools having over twice the odds of successfully completing two years of a foreign language.

• Across the cohorts, CTE schools had virtually no impact on achievement growth from 8^th to 11^th grade.  The CTE effect for learning growth in mathematics and reading comprehension was generally statistically insignificant, and the effects were always small.

A descriptive analysis of mean outcomes by cohort and CTE school indicates that while the magnitude of the differences between treatment and control students varies from school to school, the impacts are not being driven by a single CTE school or subset of schools.

Download the full report available here in pdf.

The Case for Baltimore Talent Development High School

This brief presents information that we believe will help the Baltimore City School Commissioners make an informed decision regarding the recommendations they have received as part of the School Renewal Process to end the Center for Social Organization of Schools role as school operator for Baltimore Talent  Development High School (BTDHS) in June 2013 and then move to close the school the following year. We agree with the aims of the renewal process but not their recommendation for BTDHS.

Will this action lead to better outcomes for the current students of BTDHS and the students it could serve in the future?

The supporters of BTDHS and those who know it best, its alumni, parents, teachers, current students, and community members, believe that a full reading of the evidence will show that accepting the recommendations of the Renewal Board would not be in the best interest of current BTDHS students, and the students BTDHS is designed to serve, those most impacted by the tentacles of poverty.

Speaking for the larger BTDHS community and as the operators of BTDHS, we present the following information. The core strengths of the school will be briefly discussed, as well as the role and contributions of the operator. The brief will then discuss the weaknesses of the school and present some critical information pertaining to them. It will end by presenting a path forward that could benefit all.

In addition to this brief, we invite you to read our application for renewal, which provides more detailed information on the school’s performance, the obstacles it has had to overcome, and its plans for the future. We are also available for follow-up questions or discussions.

The Renewal panel and the Renewal Rubric they applied found BTDHS to be ”Developing” in all the core areas reviewed-Academic Achievement, Climate, and Governance. The Chicago 5 Essentials Survey, a nationally validated, evidenced-based instrument that helps uncover a school’s capacity for improvement, reports that BTDHS is “moderately organized for school success.” Neither of these findings, in and of themselves, compel ending BTDHS’s relationship with its operator and closing the school. School closure has its own costs and as such is typically reserved for cases in which schools are severely under-populated or the schools performance is lower than the alternatives that exist for its students. Neither of these circumstances apply to BTDHS. The school has had steady enrollments of about 500 students since its first senior class. This enrollment fills the space that BTDHS has been allocated within the Harlem Park school complex, and the school is populated with students who primarily select it as their first or second choice (after a selective high school). The next section of this brief, moreover, will show that BTDHS is succeeding in its core mission of graduating students who need extra help and supports to succeed, as witnessed by the fact, that it has one of the highest graduation rates among all non-selective high schools in Baltimore City.

In its nine years, Baltimore Talent Development has been true to its mission. It is an Innovation High School, designed to be a better alternative to the school district’s non-selective high schools. Its mission is to serve students for whom the school district has not yet fully worked. These are students who enter high school with skills substantially below grade level and histories of chronic absenteeism or behavioral challenges. The goal of BTDHS is to provide these students with the education, experiences, and supports they need to graduate from high school prepared for adult success. In short, the school takes students who are heading off-track and positively changes the trajectory of their lives.

The strongest evidence of this is the school’s graduation rate. There is no work to support a family in the 21st century for high school dropouts. Thus, the ultimate outcome for a school system has to be its graduation rate. The difference between earning a standards-based high school diploma (as all BCPSS diplomas are) and dropping out is the difference between having decent odds of a good life, and having almost no odds. BTDHS’s five-year graduation rate, which captures students who graduate on time, as well as those who needed extra time and extra support to earn their diploma and reach state graduation standards, is compared to the other non-selective high schools in Baltimore in Table 1. Maryland State Department of Education data graduation rates show BTDHS is among the top performing, non-selective high schools in Baltimore. In fact, and we believe this is the critical piece of information to inform the school commissioners decision, there is only one non-selective high school with statistically significant higher graduation rates for BTDHS students to attend, should the school be closed. Hence in reality, many of BTDHS’s students, as well as future students in need of additional supports to graduate, would end up at high schools where their odds of graduating are lower, in some cases 20 percentage points lower. Currently 80% of students who attend non-selective high schools go to schools with lower graduation rates than BTDHS, only 5% (those who attend the National Academy of Finance) go to schools with statistically significant higher rates.

The success of the school in achieving its mission of taking students where they are and providing them with the education, experience, and supports they need to graduate from high school can also be seen in Table 1 by comparing BTDHS’s graduation outcomes to the state of Maryland and BCPSS. Maryland for five years in row has been found to have the best school system in the United States by Education Week. Its five-year graduation rate for students who receive free and reduced price lunch is identical to BTDHS’s. BCPSS has rightly been recognized as one of the fastest improving urban school districts, and in particular, for its great strides in raising its graduation rates, especially among young men of color. BTDHS’s five-year graduation rate is 8 percentage points higher than the school district’s for all students, and young men of color.

5-Year Graduation Rates for Non-Selective High Schools
5-Year Grad Rate 2011
National Academy Foundation 86
Baltimore Freedom 82
Renaissance 81
Academy of College and Career 80
Baltimore Talent Development 79
Vivien T. Thomas 79
State of Maryland 79*
Patterson 79
New Era 73
Digital 73
Maritime 73
Baltimore City 71
Heritage High 67
W.E.B. DuBois 65
Forest Park 65
Northwestern 63
Reginald Lewis 60
Augusta Fells Savage 60
Frederick Douglass 58
Southside 56
*for students who receive free and reduced price lunch
Resources for table from Maryland State Report Card: http://www.mdreportcard.org

The Renewal Panel applied a rubric that looked at four-year graduation rates, and developed a scale of effectiveness that was not benchmarked against the available alternatives or success rates achieved in other similar districts (for example graduation rates in Baltimore that put a school on the path to closure, are held up in NYC as definitive proof that the district’s reforms are working). Table 2 applies the Renewal Rubric for graduation rates to all non-selective high schools in Baltimore, as well the state of Maryland, and BCPSS. This shows that according to the graduation rate effectiveness scale used in the Renewal process, the State of Maryland — five-time winner of the best school system in the U.S. ranking — would be rated “Developing” like BTDHS, and the school district of Baltimore, which has made great strides in increasing its graduation rates, would be rated “Non-Effective,” as would the overwhelming majority of non-selective high schools.

4-Year Graduation Rates for Non-Selective High Schools
4-Year Grad Rate 2011 | Renewal Panel Rubric Applied
National Academy Foundation 86.3 Effective
Renaissance 76.6 Effective
Vivien T. Thomas 75.5 Effective
Baltimore Freedom 73.7 Developing
State of Maryland 73.7* Developing
Baltimore Talent Development 73.6 Developing
Patterson 73.6 Developing
Academy of College and Career 70.7 Not Effective
Digital 67.8 Not Effective
Baltimore City 66.7 Not Effective
Heritage High 65.5 Not Effective
W.E.B. DuBois 64 Not Effective
Maritime 63.2 Not Effective
New Era 61.5 Not Effective
Forest Park 60 Not Effective
Northwestern 56.9 Not Effective
Augusta Fells Savage 54.6 Not Effective
Reginald Lewis 54.1 Not Effective
Southside 49.6 Not Effective
Frederick Douglass 49.5 Not Effective
*for students who receive free and reduced price lunch
Resources for table from Maryland State Report Card: http://www.mdreportcard.org

BTDHS was launched in 2003, among the second group of Innovation High Schools established by BCPSS in partnership with a coalition of local foundations, including Abell and the Open Society, MSDE, the teachers’ union, and national foundations, most prominently, the Gates Foundation. The purpose of Innovation High Schools was for external partners, including universities and non-profits, to partner with the school district to create new schools. These would be designed to better serve students who would otherwise attend the school district’s then neighborhood non-selective high schools, which faced an overwhelming concentration of students in need of additional academic and non-academic supports. Hence, potential operators were asked to submit school designs to the high school reform review panel that would show how they would address the needs and greatly improve the outcomes for students who, because of their below grade level skills, or attendance and school behavior histories did not qualify for the district’s high schools with admissions requirements, including its vocational schools. Innovation high schools operate as contract schools, in which the operator can provide input into principal and staff selection, and within the resources provided by BCPSS work to implement the school design approved by the High School Reform committee. Innovation schools receive the same funding as BCPSS schools. They are not charters, do not receive the charter school funding allocation, nor charters’ level of independence from BCPSS.

The Center for Social Organization of Schools is an applied Research and Development unit at Johns Hopkins University School of Education, which has studied and developed interventions and reforms to address the conditions which lead to unacceptable education outcomes for children who live in poverty. It serves as the Innovation School operator for Baltimore Talent Development High School, with a role defined by a contract with BCPSS and the funding currently made available under fair student funding. In practice, what this means is that CSOS, helps implement its evidence-based school reform model, Talent Development Secondary at the school, (for details on the Talent Development school model please visit www.talentdevelopmentsecondary.org)j, provides input into principal selection and annual performance reviews, and directly funds a range of student supports and teacher professional development efforts.

A key fact to note is that CSOS receives no financial support from the school’s budget or the school district for its efforts and the direct in-school supports it provides. Rather through its own fundraising and support of the university, it supports five adults who work in the building on a daily basis, a team of four more who provide supports on a weekly basis, and a host of others who provide on-going assistance to students, teachers, administrators, and programs at the school. In addition, it also provides the funding for a number of student support and professional development programs. Hence, if the recommendation to end CSOS’s role as operator of an Innovation High School, is accepted, the following supports will not be available at the school next year.

• A full-time math coach, in the building daily, to provide on-going professional development to the school’s math faculty, as well as support and manage the HSA and Bridge programs in mathematics. Both roles are crucial, as unfortunately is the case in most high poverty nonselective high schools in Baltimore, there are high levels of faculty turnover particularly in mathematics.
• A full- time tutor, in the building daily, for students who are severely behind, (four or more grade levels) in their reading skills.
• A full-time coordinator, in the building daily, for the school’s Arts and Expressions and after school programs, as well as the funding needed to pay for these opportunities. These programs bring in skilled professionals to teach students photography, dance, spoken word, archeology, pottery etc., and provide the students with critical opportunities to both broaden their horizons and experience success.
• Full- time support, in the building daily, from a Talent Development school transformation facilitator, who helps the administrators and staff implement the Talent Development design. She also provides direct support to teacher teams and teaming (the Chicago 5 essentials survey rate the school as excellent and above the school district average for teacher collaboration) and assistance with the design and delivery of the schools on-going teacher professional development program. The school transformation facilitator also runs the schools new teacher induction, training, and support program, and organizes the additional week of professional development for the entire staff, which CSOS funds every year.
• Daily assistance with the schools award-winning drama programs.
• Weekly teacher coaching from CSOS math and English facilitators, on-going support of science teachers and the schools science program, through a web of partnerships formed and coordinated with the JHU physics, biology, and chemistry departments, and financial and human assistance with school efforts like attendance campaigns, student recognitions, and field trips.

The renewal report stated three areas of weakness: academic achievement, chronic absenteeism and parental satisfaction. BTDHS has room to improve in all these areas. However, a key mitigating and correctable variable, which greatly impacted all three of the reported weaknesses, did not receive sufficient attention in the report. For reasons beyond the control of the operator (personnel issues and Family Medical Leave) , BTDHS for three years in a row, from 2009-10 to 2011-12,did not have an active principal in the school for essentially half of each school year. Details are provided in our renewal application. The result is school leadership suffered as the assistant principals in the building had to do their jobs plus the principal’s, and slipped into survival, not improvement, mode, and the teachers were left leaderless.

The impact of this can clearly be seen in the data. 2009, the last year the school had a principal in the building for the full year, was the high water mark for the school, and demonstrates more accurately, what it can achieve when at full strength. In that year, the school was recognized by the school commissioners as one of the few high schools in Baltimore that made AYP for two years in a row, a year after it was the subject of a four-part front page series in USA Today, as a success story. Its mathematics achievement level in 2009 would have earned an effective rating from the school renewal rubric and its English achievement a developing rating. This is also significant, because 2009 was the school’s fifth year of operation, when its contract should have gone through the renewal process. Instead its renewal was delayed by BCPSS for three years, which led to the key data year for renewal lining up with the point when the school was maximally stressed — the end of its third year without a principal in the building for the full year.

BTDHS current achievement levels are not where they need to be, but as demonstrated in our renewal application, they are still better, or as good as, the alternatives available to BTDHS students in other non-selective high schools. We, however, do not accept these levels, and like BCPSS are continuing to search for means to improve them. Over the past three years, in this regard, we have participated in every pilot improvement program BCPSS has offered, including this year’s common core pilots. A core strength of the partnership between BTDHS and CSOS, is that CSOS is able to bring to bring its research capabilities to bear to help solve challenges the school faces. In this regard, we are currently partnering, for example, with Agile Minds and the Dana Center at the University of Texas at Austin, to develop solutions for an unmet need — supporting students who enter high school more than two grade levels behind, as most BTDHS and many BCPSS students unfortunately do, to meet Common Core ninth grade expectations.

We believe, moreover, that the straightest path back to the higher achievement levels obtained by BTDHS when it had consistent strong principal leadership, is to secure a strong, stable leader for the school. Working with us, to insure this happens, seems like a much more effective and sure path to obtaining higher outcomes for BTDHS students than to scattering them to other schools many with lower outcomes.

The same is true for chronic absenteeism. The irony here is that both CSOS and BCPSS are viewed as leaders in building awareness of the importance of focusing on reducing chronic absenteeism, and in developing strategies to combat it. However, neither CSOS nor BCPSS or others involved in the effort to  understand and combat chronic absenteeism, has been able to fully understand the forces at play for high  school students in the highest poverty communities. BTDHS’s rate of chronic absenteeism is no better or worse than other non-selective high schools serving the highest needs students, as seen in the table below. That said, BTDHS will not rest until we have figured out how to help all our students attend on a regular basis. This year we are running focus groups to gain a deeper understanding of the causes behind chronic absenteeism and conducting a Count Me In campaign to help students finish the year with strong attendance.

Chronic Absenteeism 2012
Augusta Fells Savage 47.7
Forest Park 55.1
Frederick Douglass 59.3
Heritage High 62.6
Maritime 58.9
Northwestern 54.8
Patterson 56.6
Reginald Lewis 39.1
Southside 56.3
Vivien T. Thomas 48.4
W.E.B. DuBois 52.9
GROUP AVERAGE 53.8
Baltimore City All High Schools 45.6
Resources for table from Maryland State Report Card: http://www.mdreportcard.org

The renewal panel also found BTDHS to be non-effective in terms of parental satisfaction. We do not believe that this was measured in a valid manner. BTDHS parent satisfaction index shows that 77 percent of parents are satisfied with the school. The renewal rubric says that satisfying three out of four parents is not effective but it does not base this on an evidence based benchmark or how much parental satisfaction is required for a high school to be effective. Rather it is derived by creating arbitrary cut points and comparing, the results of BTDHS to all other schools in Baltimore, elementary, and middle, selective and non-selective, even though it is well establish that parental satisfaction is higher in the elementary grades. We were also informed that having 84 percent of parents say they are satisfied would place a school above the 50th percentile and earn them a rating of developing. Given that the sample size for the high school surveys in particular are low, we leave it to the wisdom of the School Commissioners to decide if an effectiveness rating of 77 vs 84% (which could be influenced by having just a few more of parents out of hundreds responding to the survey) is the difference between a more and less effective school. BTDHS works hard to involve its parents at many levels, but we have also found that large numbers of our students are effectively raising themselves.

In this brief, we have presented data, to make the case that BTDHS like many of the non-selective high schools in Baltimore, faces a high degree of challenge in educating students who enter high school multiple years behind grade level and with histories of chronic absenteeism, but has found ways to mitigate these circumstances and true to its mission change the life trajectories of its students. By enabling at least eight out of ten of its students to graduate better prepared for adult success, it is succeeding at a rate only bested by one school, and substantially better than most other non-selective high schools in Baltimore. Hence, ending the role of CSOS as operator and closing the school would not likely result in BTDHS students attending schools with better outcomes and hence increase their odds of success, and would prevent future students from benefitting from the school’s supports.

We are not satisfied with current outcomes and, if given the chance to continue, will work to bring an expanded level of student and teacher support to the school. We propose to work with the city, to make good on a plan started but then stopped several years ago, to turn the Harlem Park complex into a community center, with city agencies in the building to increase the effectiveness with which the nonacademic needs of the area’s students, as well as their parents and families, including teenage pregnancy, childcare, substance abuse, mental and physical health needs, and homelessness are met. The idea is to bring the full weight of existing supports from the department of social services, the health department, police, the department of juvenile services, foster care etc. to bear, in an integrated fashion working hand in glove with the school to provide students with a strong web of academic and non-academic supports. We would also draw on what we have been learning across the nation with our Diplomas Now program which combines whole school reform with enhanced student supports, guided by an early warning system in partnership with City Year and Communities In Schools, whom we would endeavor to bring to BTDHS as well. The goal, is to work with BCPSS and Baltimore City to create a model, for providing the level of supports adolescents who live in poverty of the magnitude found in the Harlem Park community need to come to school every day and work hard, and be provided a clear pathway to adult success. We envision that this school could operate as a R and D, and teaching and training lab, for leaders and teachers from other non-selective high schools in Baltimore. In short, rather they debate data, we should pool our resources, CS0S, BCPSS, and the City to create a model school to the benefit of all.

We want to close though, not with statistics, but with our students. Students who through the unending support of their teachers and staff at BTDHS were enabled to go beyond the path life’s circumstances seem to have in store for them to achieve remarkable feats. Student’s like Linzy, who introduced himself to us in 2004 as an entering freshman during the summer bridge program, as someone who would be president of the United States. Helped by the school through some difficult challenges, Linzy graduated and is on his way, working on the Baltimore mayor’s staff. Or students like Kevin, who learned that he could debate like few others in the nation when at BTDHS he became the only Kentucky Fellow for Debate from an urban school and now has recently won the West Point Tournament for Towson University. Then there is Indigo, Lakeisha, and Christian who came alive at BTDHS and while there earned a scholarship to go to India and are now in college — one studying to become a teacher. Laura, a current student, who is homeless but thriving at school, wrapped in a tight web of adult support, and will graduate this year has said she did not know any other school where she mattered this much.
Sincerely,

Robert Balfanz
Operator, Baltimore Talent Development High School and
The Baltimore Talent Development High School Community

See the video, including EGC’s own Dr. Robert Balfanz, here on CNN.com.

The study specifically probed the relationship between eighth- and ninth-grade early warning indicators as predictors of graduation outcomes, as well as the relationship between ninth-grade indicators and college enrollment outcomes. In particular, it sought to address the following questions:

1. To what extent did students in two ninth-grade cohorts exhibit early warning indicators of nongraduation in eighth grade and ninth grade? To what extent were eighth- and ninth-grade early warning indicators correlated?
2. To what extent do eighth-grade early warning indicators (attendance, behavior problems, and course failure) explain the variation in graduation outcomes? How do they compare with ninth-grade indicators in their explanatory power?
3. To what extent do ninth-grade school-level factors influence non-graduation outcomes?
4. To what extent do eighth- and ninth-grade student outcomes influence college enrollment outcomes?
5. What do findings about the relationships between early warning indicators and graduation and college enrollment outcomes suggest about the kinds of intervention strategies needed to improve student outcomes?

The analysis was based on two cohorts of all ninth graders in Baltimore City Public Schools in 2004-05 and 2005-06,1 and drew on yearly data on school enrollment and withdrawal, grade level, attendance, test scores, suspensions, and course grades. In addition, data from the National Student Clearinghouse on college enrollment were merged into these cohort files.

The results are divided into three parts. Parts I and II present descriptive analyses of the data, including frequencies, cross-tabulations, means, and other descriptive summaries that show the relationship between various student behaviors/early warning indicators (such as absenteeism, GPA, or course failures) and high school graduation and college enrollment outcomes. Part III then reports the results of multi-level modeling analyses of the data, wherein the relative impact of eighth- and ninth-grade early warning indicators on high school graduation and college enrollment outcomes are presented.

• As expected, ninth-grade indicators proved to be more powerful predictors of high school outcomes than eighth-grade indicators, suggesting that interventions designed to prevent students from slipping into chronic absence and course failure in ninth grade are crucial for increasing the graduation rate in Baltimore and similar districts.
• At the same time, the strength of eighth-grade variables (particularly chronic absence) in predicting outcomes was striking. These findings provide evidence of the importance of interventions mounted prior to the beginning of ninth grade to help reverse chronic absenteeism and increase the probability of graduation for struggling students.
• Analyses also indicate the importance of explicitly addressing the needs of male students, since they are still significantly less likely to graduate, even when controlling for their higher levels of behavioral early warning indicators.
• In addition, the findings emphasize how being overage for grade reduces the probability of graduation, even controlling for the associated behavioral indicators. Finding ways to increase learning time during the school year and summer, rather than retaining students in grade in the elementary grades, may be a crucial step in reducing the number of students who fail to graduate from high school.
• The findings also indicate that eighth-grade proficiency in math and reading and both cumulative GPA and ninth-grade GPA increase the probability of college enrollment, suggesting that the “gatekeeper issues” of low ninth-grade GPAs and the lack of proficiency upon entrance to high school need to be addressed as crucial steps for reaching the goal of raising college readiness rates and the proportion of students who enroll in college after high school.

The discussion section of this report examines how the district has responded to research on early warning indicators. While important steps have been taken, particularly in the area of increasing attendance and reducing the number of suspensions, challenges remain for the district in preventing students from falling off-track to graduation through course failure.

The discussion explores structural factors that may be influencing the district’s orientation towards early warning indicators, including the district’s decentralized, “portfolio” approach to school governance. Several topics and areas for future research are identified, and the report concludes with an examination of the role the Baltimore Education Research Center could play in future district efforts to address and integrate research data into school reform efforts.

Download the full report available here in pdf.

The story explores how adults at a Bronx middle school analyze the ABC data weekly and work to keep each kid on track, a strategy behind the national Diplomas Now model. Balfanz argues that there aren’t enough teachers to reach every struggling student so schools need to get creative and bring in a “second shift” of adults — national service corps members, volunteers, retired teachers — so that everyone in “that group of kids in the middle” has an adult, which is a big part of Diplomas Now.

Watch the Frontline story here.

Because it is not measured, chronic absenteeism is not acted upon. Like bacteria in a hospital, chronic absenteeism can wreak havoc long before it is discovered. If the evidence in this report is borne out through more systematic data collection and analysis, that havoc may have already undermined school reform efforts of the past quarter century and negated the positive impact of future efforts.

Students need to attend school daily to succeed. The good news of this report is that being in school leads to succeeding in school. Achievement, especially in math, is very sensitive to attendance, and absence of even two weeks during one school year matters. Attendance also strongly affects standardized test scores and graduation and dropout rates. Educators and policymakers cannot truly understand achievement gaps or efforts to close them without considering chronic absenteeism.

Chronic absenteeism is not the same as truancy or average daily attendance – the attendance rate schools use for state report cards and federal accountability. Chronic absenteeism means missing 10 percent of a school year for any reason. A school can have average daily attendance of 90 percent and still have 40 percent of its students chronically absent, because on different days, different students make up that 90 percent.

Data from only six states address this issue: Georgia, Florida, Maryland, Nebraska, Oregon and Rhode Island. How these states measure chronic absenteeism, however, differs by number of days and by whether or not data include transfer students.

Such limited data produce only an educated guess at the size of the nation’s attendance challenge: A national rate of 10 percent chronic absenteeism seems conservative and it could be as high as 15 percent, meaning that 5 million to 7.5 million students are chronically absent. Looking at this more closely sharpens the impact. In Maryland, for instance, there are 58 elementary schools that have 50 or more chronically absent students; that is, two classrooms of students who miss more than a month of school a year. In a high school, where chronic absenteeism is higher, there are 61 schools where 250 or more students are missing a month or more of school.

The six states reported chronic absentee rates from 6 percent to 23 percent, with high poverty urban areas reporting up to one-third of students chronically absent. In poor rural areas, one in four students can miss at least a month’s worth of school. The negative impact chronic absenteeism has on school success is increased because students who are chronically absent in one year are often chronically absent in multiple years. As a result, particularly in high poverty areas, significant numbers of students are missing amounts of school that are staggering: on the order of six months to over a year, over a five year period.

Chronic absenteeism is most prevalent among low-income students. Gender and ethnic background do not appear to play a role in this. The youngest and the oldest students tend to have the highest rates of chronic absenteeism, with students attending most regularly in third through fifth grades. Chronic absenteeism begins to rise in middle school and continues climbing through 12^th grade, with seniors often having the highest rate of all. The data also suggest that chronic absenteeism is concentrated in relatively few schools, with 15 percent of schools in Florida, for example, accounting for at least half of all chronically absent students.

Missing school matters:

• In a nationally representative data set, chronic absence in kindergarten was associated with lower academic performance in first grade. The impact is twice as great for students from low-income families.
• A Baltimore study found a strong relationship between sixth-grade attendance and the percentage of students graduating on time or within a year of their expected high school graduation.
• Chronic absenteeism increases achievement gaps at the elementary, middle, and high school levels.
• Because students reared in poverty benefit the most from being in school, one of the most effective strategies for providing pathways out of poverty is to do what it takes to get these students in school every day. This alone, even without improvements in the American education system, will drive up achievement, high school graduation, and college attainment rates.

Students miss school for many reasons. These can, however, be divided into three broad categories:

• Students who cannot attend school due to illness, family responsibilities, housing instability, the need to work or involvement with the juvenile justice system.
• Students who will not attend school to avoid bullying, unsafe conditions, harassment and embarrassment.
• Students who do not attend school because they, or their parents, do not see the value in being there, they have something else they would rather do, or nothing stops them from skipping school.

Despite being pervasive, though overlooked, chronic absenteeism is raising flags in some schools and communities. This awareness is leading to attendance campaigns that are so vigorous and comprehensive they pay off quickly. Examples of progress nationally and at state, district, and school levels give hope to the challenge of chronic absenteeism, besides being models for others.

In addition to these efforts, both the federal government, state departments of education, and school districts need to regularly measure and report the rates of chronic absenteeism and regular attendance (missing five days or less a year) for every school. State and district policies need to encourage every student to attend school every day and support school districts, schools, non-profits, communities, and parents in using evidence-based strategies to act upon these data to propel all students to attend school daily. Mayors and governors have critical roles to play in leading inter-agency task forces that bring health, housing, justice, transportation, and education agencies together to organize coordinated efforts to help every student attend every day.

Download the full report, available here in pdf.

Download the presentation tool, available here as a  PowerPoint show.

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