In my first year as a high school teacher at an urban high school of about 1400 students, I was assigned to one of these rooms for a few hours a week. The room included a handful of motivated students who were just passing through.  A few confessed to me that they knew they were hanging around with the wrong friends, but they were determined to do better so they could graduate high school with their peers. Somebody had gotten through to them--a parent or teacher, or they had fixated on a goal like becoming a mechanic or moving once they graduated.

High school dropouts to be

At the other extreme, were the four or five "at risk" students who sat, or rather slumped in their chairs along the back wall, staring at computer monitors, the hoods of their sweatshirts or coats shrouding their faces. The hoods shielded them from a world with which they felt no connection. It had rejected them and they rejected it. They were in cold storage, not making much, or any, progress toward graduation.

By most standards this was a good school--caring teachers, a smart, concerned administration that was looking for ways to establish greater personal contact with those students who most needed help. But the sad fact was that it may have been too late in the educational process for many of these students.

Administrators are resorting to desperate measures in an effort to reconnect to these students. In Tilton, New Hampshire, Winnisquam Regional High School Principal Kimberly Saunders is making house calls to recent high school dropouts. She brings each student a graduation checklist, explaining his or her missing credits, and proposes ways the teens can return to school. So far, she and her assistant principal have persuaded 12 students to return to school Four have graduated.

What would the success rate be if a systematic process was in place to identify these students far earlier?

Robert Balfanz, a Johns Hopkins University researcher and a leader in the effort to end the high school dropout crisis, says work in four urban school districts proves that about half of high school dropouts can be identified by the end of sixth grade. Based on a study of 13,000 Philadelphia school district students, Balfanz and colleagues Liza Herzog and Douglas MacIver identified four indicators that educators could use as early as middle school to identify students likely to drop out.