To increase the percentage of students who graduate, educators need to know the “warning signs” that will alert them to students who are falling off the pathway to graduation.  Interventions can be tailored to address the particular problem that is keeping students from staying on-track.

The idea behind early indicators analytics work is simple but powerful.  Years before dropouts actually leave high school, most of them send strong “signals” that they are having some sort of trouble in school.  Further, these signals are observable in standard types of data that school districts keep on their students.  Evidence from a study in one large school district suggests that almost half of the eventual dropouts sent “warning signals” as early as sixth grade.

Researchers from the Everyone Graduates Center work with school districts and states to identify the “warning signs” that students send when they are on the pathway to dropping out of high school.  In pilot projects supported by the Center, educators have been using real-time data to intervene with students who exhibit one or more early indicators of dropout.