'Diplomas Now' Offers Potential Dropouts Lots of Help
The Diplomas Now model, spreading in cities across the nation, uses an early- warning system to identify potential dropouts and offers intensive social support to help students make it through.
On a dead-end street in a hardscrabble corner of this city, an experiment to keep students from dropping out of school begins with 11-year-olds.
Even before the first bell rings at Feltonville School of Arts and Sciences, and long after the last bell sounds, students are drawn into a web of activities and relationships designed to keep them on track with their studies. From the greeting-and-bonding activity in the school courtyard each morning to the homework help and community-service projects into the late afternoons, students are linked with a team of adults who serve as mentors, monitors, teachers, naggers, and nurturers. Some even follow the neediest students from class to class, offering minute-by-minute help.
The 750-student middle school in upper north Philadelphia is a showcase for a comprehensive approach to dropout prevention. It produced such dramatic improvements in attendance, behavior, and course-passing rates last year that it’s being tried this year in 11 more middle or high schools in Chicago, Los Angeles, New Orleans,...
This article is available to subscribers only.
To keep reading this article and more, subscribe now or start a 2-week FREE trial.
Subscribe to Education Week
You Save 20% or More!
Access selected articles, e-newsletters and more!
Viewed
Emailed
Recommended
Commented
Sponsored Whitepapers
• Best Practices in Information Management, Reporting and Analytics for Education
• Smart infrastructure report to get your district ready for future IT needs.
• Integrating Social and Emotional RTI to Improve Student Performance
• Taming the wild west: How America’s third largest school district manages PCs, Macs, and iPads
• Overcoming the Odds: Getting Every Student to College YES Prep Shares Its Success Story
- Regional Area Partner
- Focus EduVation, US
- Principal
- The Berkeley Institute, HAMILTON, Bermuda
- Assistant Superintendent for Teaching and Learning
- Roanoke City Public Schools, Roanoke, VA
- Superintendent
- Round Rock ISD, Round Rock, TX
- Principal
- Christ the King Preparatory School, NJ