Improving High School Graduation Rates

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• eSN Special Report: Keeping students on a path to graduation

• Successful credit recovery programs from four districts

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Credit recovery programs are helping students stay on track.

“College-ready” and “career-ready” are major buzzwords in the educational field these days, as President Obama’s push to increase graduation rates gains traction. Educators have spent a great deal of time and energy deciphering what it means to make students college- and career-ready—but a significant portion of the conversation has focused on finding ways to keep kids in school in the first place.

Early intervention and credit recovery programs can pave the way for students to remain on the road to graduation, and a growing number of school systems are turning to online options for delivering these services.

“My members have been having conversations about the fact that, before we can talk about kids being college- and career-ready, we have to reduce dropout rates [and] increase our graduation rates,” says Brenda Welburn, executive director of the National Association of State Boards of Education. “Many kids don’t find school relevant, especially as they get older.”

The challenge, she says, is not just to give lip service to the need for relevance, but to make the connection real for today’s learners between the outside world and that of school.

Educators are determined to find that relevance by giving students more of the skills they’ll need to succeed in a globally competitive economy—the so-called “21st-century skills” such as problem solving, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration—in addition to traditional skills such as reading and writing.

In the 2010 Speak Up survey from Project Tomorrow, a national survey of the attitudes and opinions of students, parents, teachers, and administrators toward education and technology, 38 percent of the nearly 15,000 K-12 school leaders who responded said that “integrating 21st-century skills into the curriculum” was the best way to improve student outcomes, particularly in terms of increasing college and career readiness. This was the second most popular response to the question, following 49 percent of administrators who believed the best way to improve student outcomes was by enhancing teacher effectiveness through professional development or professional learning communities.

Going hand-in-hand with developing students’ 21st-century skills and making school relevant for today’s learners is keeping them engaged in their education.

Today’s students have gotten used to being “plugged in” and connected with technology nearly constantly when they are outside of school, whether through PCs and laptops, or gaming systems like the Nintendo DS or the Wii, or through phones and tablet computers—and their interest in school often lags when technology is not integrated into instruction.