My colleague Sean Cavanagh has an interesting item in his blog today about a new online tool designed to help schools catch secondary students who run an elevated risk of dropping out of school.
Check it out here.
This tool tracks students by several factors that research suggests are proxies for dropout risk: attendance, credits earned, and grade point average.
Chicago has a major initiative under way to track those factors, as well. For each entering 9th grader, school staff now have a spreadsheet profiling their dropout risk. Then they have to marshal their resources to provide the right interventions. I reported on how that was unfolding at one school in a recent story here.