How can we improve graduation rates

The return on investment of a college education is well-documented, leading to meaningful employment, economic mobility, and even increased life expectancy. This pattern has not changed appreciably in 40 years. At the level of students and their families, challenges that reduce graduation rates include having lower income, lower high school GPAs, limited family support, and poor social integration, among other factors. At the institutional level, a host of additional challenges lower graduation rates.

These include choices about financial expenditure on students, the depth of student advising and career education, and the overall social climate to foster a sense of belonging for all students. This conceptual work has been followed by decades of empirical research to identify concrete investments that help students persist in their studies to graduation. Nevertheless, despite all the research and handwringing about this issue, little has changed in the last 25 years.

College students who never complete their degree enter their working lives with limited college preparation for a career, not to mention often crippling student debt. Maybe we are looking at the problem in the wrong way. Rather than focusing on who is not graduating, we can turn our attention to those who do and to those institutions that enjoy higher graduation rates than others. Let us look for positive deviants.

Positive deviance posits that some individuals or institutions, facing the same challenges as their peers, still manage to find better outcomes by using uncommon behaviors and strategies. Using lessons from positive deviance, academic leadership can look to the institutions that have greater success rates. An early, well-known application of positive deviance was to address food insecurity in Vietnam , where researchers identified the positive-deviant families who were able to successfully nourish their children within a community where children were largely starving.

Not only did this discovery help the entire community adopt the winning strategies—in this case, feeding their children high-protein shrimp and fish that many in the community believed were taboo—but also it continues to be a life-saving way of life 30 years later.

Positive deviance has also been a critical tool in improving performance among health-care institutions. Our Evidence Blast series provides evidence-based research, data, and resources to help practitioners and policymakers make important decisions about schools and students.

Schools, districts, and states in the Northwest are committed to increasing the number of students who graduate from high school ready for college and careers, but reaching this goal is a challenge.

Four states in the region lag behind the national average in on-time graduation rates, with only Montana exceeding the national benchmark. One way REL Northwest addresses this regional priority is to help spread promising practices by sharing success stories. Recent examples include describing how a commitment to equity has helped close the graduation gap for Latino students in one Oregon district and demonstrating districts' use of Montana's Early Warning System.

Preventing Dropout in Secondary Schools This What Works Clearinghouse practice guide is an excellent introduction to research on evidence-based strategies. It provides examples of and suggestions for implementing four recommendations to reduce dropout rates and improve high school graduation rates:. The paper includes research, data, and resources related to families and students who have experienced or are experiencing trauma, whether chronic or short term.

The program utilized twelfth grade student peer leaders to create a supportive environment for incoming ninth grade students. Sign In Subscribe. Reset Search. Share article Remove Save to favorites Save to favorites. John Gomperts, Jenny Nagaoka. Contributor, Contributor. The transition from the middle grades to high school can lead even good students to struggle.

Thank you for subscribing. Nov 12 Fri. This content is provided by our sponsor. It is not written by and does not necessarily reflect the views of Education Week's editorial staff. These data points help you. Content provided by ACT. Nov 15 Mon. Help every student belong in school with these practices for school climate. Content provided by Panorama. Nov 16 Tue. And while most students in special.

See More Events. Teacher Jobs. Search over ten thousand teaching jobs nationwide — elementary, middle, high school and more. Principal Jobs. Find hundreds of jobs for principals, assistant principals, and other school leadership roles. Administrator Jobs. Over a thousand district-level jobs: superintendents, directors, more.