Schools saw significant improvements in students’ absenteeism and course failure rates after two years working intentionally building robust student success systems that get at-risk students back on track early, according to a new report that analyzes data from more than 50 schools.
Participating schools saw a 32% drop in course failures and a 28% decrease in chronic absenteeism, according to the report.
In 2023, dozens of schools piloted retooled, relationship-centered strategies for supporting students as part of a program through the GRAD Partnership, a coalition of 12 organizations that partner with schools to carry out the implementation of student-success systems.
The progress schools have made in implementing these efforts and their impact on students’ academics and attendance have been monitored and reported annually. With two full years of data in hand, project leaders say the results are “encouraging”: Students are missing fewer days of school and failing fewer classes. And those positive results continue to grow each year, as the schools deepen their work, said Robert Balfanz, the director of the Everyone Graduates Center at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education, who has worked with schools on connectedness strategies through the GRAD Partnership.
“We’ve seen schools are able to see benefits in the first year, and then they see added benefits by working on it longer and adding more components,” Balfanz said. “That’s important, too, to show they’re not hitting their ceiling right away—the benefits continue to grow the more they invest.”
These efforts, known as “student-success systems,” represent the “next generation” of earlier interventions like multitiered systems of support and early-warning systems, Balfanz said. They use data points such as academics and attendance to identify at-risk students and target increasingly extensive interventions depending on individual levels of need.
Unlike those earlier approaches, student-success systems also incorporate information about school climate, social-emotional learning, and students’ sense of connectedness—measured by simple, recurring surveys that ask whether students feel known and supported by adults and classmates.
Student-support teams regularly review the data to flag classroom- and building-level concerns and to identify students who need targeted attention.
“Historically, we’ve been pretty reactive in our student supports and we wait for something pretty major to happen before we do something,” Balfanz said. “We wait for kids to fail a class or get suspended or become truant, because either the data to monitor the progression to those points didn’t exist or it existed in silos and wasn’t examined holistically. If you pay attention, schools can organize themselves to identify students’ needs sooner rather than later, and that’s good for everybody.”
Streamlined monitoring shows promising results
In addition to traditional supports, like academic tutoring, student-success teams may take new approaches to building school connectedness, such as encouraging involvement of at-risk students in extracurricular activities or pairing students with peers who share similar interests.
The work is built around research that suggests students have better results in school if they believe that there is an adult who cares about them, their work has value, and they feel welcome.
Participating schools are seeing the payoff, according to the report.
Schools found, on average, a two-year decline in chronic absenteeism of 8 percentage points (a 28% decline) for grades in which they implemented student-success systems with GRAD Partnership support.
In implementing schools’ middle and high school grades, the chronic absenteeism rate—defined as missing 10% of school days or more in a year—declined, on average, from 34% to 30%, a 4 percentage point and 12% decline, according to the report.
Those findings build on a report after the first year of the partnership.
In the first year, the 41 pilot schools that reported academic data saw rates of students failing one or more courses drop from 25.5% in 2021–22 to 20.5% in 2022–23. Rates of chronic absenteeism dropped from 27.5% to 21.4% in pilot schools.
“With the proper support, schools can implement student success systems that ensure students not only stay on-track through high school completion, but thrive throughout, and are propelled into post-secondary and adult success,” the report continues.
The results also show the benefits of streamlining student-support teams, Balfanz said. Many schools have a hodgepodge of different teams to monitor various aspects of students’ performance and behavior, like attendance-monitoring teams, mental health teams, and academics teams, he said. Each is tasked with a small part of the students’ experiences, and it is harder to catch patterns of behavior that might serve as a warning the child could use an intervention, before their problems become larger, he said.
“That’s a lot of teams and a lot of meetings, and oftentimes, kids’ challenges are more holistic than just one piece that these teams are looking it,” Balfanz said. “So, this is making the case that if you bring all of these little teams together into one big student-success team, you could probably get more done.”
