Assisting Students Who Enter High School with Poor Academic Skills
Too many students in the United States arrive at high school unprepared academically. Many of these students fail to make the critical transition from middle school to high school successfully and drop out of school, often by tenth grade. Those who don’t drop out often find it difficult to earn credits necessary to advance from one grade to the next and perform poorly on measures of achievement, like course grades and standardized tests. MDRC’s recent evaluations of high school reform models — particularly Talent Development and First Things First — suggest that focusing on the critical transition year of ninth grade can make a real difference. For example, the Ninth Grade Success Academy — the centerpiece of the Talent Development model — tackled the problem of low achievement among entering ninth-graders head-on through interconnected changes in scheduling and curricula and produced positive results for many students. The Talent Development experience suggests the following lessons:
- A double-blocked class schedule is useful because it permits students to attempt and earn more credits per year than other scheduling arrangements. In contrast to a traditional schedule (entailing daily 50-minute classes) or a single-blocked schedule (involving 80- or 90-minute classes meeting every other day), a double-blocked schedule calls for classes that meet daily for extended periods. Because double-blocked classes can cover in a single semester what would normally be a year’s worth of material, students in Talent Development schools could earn four full course credits each term and eight credits each year, compared with the six or sometimes seven credits per year that students would receive in schools following a traditional schedule.
- Semester-long, intensive “catch-up” courses that shore up ninth-grade students’ skills in reading and mathematics appear to help students succeed in the regular curriculum, with gains in credits earned being sustained over time. The catch-up courses in Talent Development awarded elective credits and were designed to precede and prepare students for college preparatory classes in English and algebra. (The double-blocked schedule allowed the catch-up and regular classes to be sequenced in this way.) First-time ninth-graders in the Talent Development schools were significantly more likely than their counterparts elsewhere to earn one or more credits in English and algebra. For these students, too, the intervention increased the total number of credits earned in the first three years of high school.
- The structured curriculum of catch-up courses, combined with longer class periods, may have helped ensure that students spent more time “on task” in these classes. More time in the classroom may not in itself be enough to improve student achievement; what appears to matter is that the extra time be used to maximize learning. Most First Things First schools made substantial progress in implementing longer English and math class periods. However, no special curricula were in place during the period under study (a situation that First Things First has subsequently addressed), and most expansion-site schools did not register increases in student achievement.
- Little is known about how best to assist and prevent dropping out among those students who struggle the most in ninth grade. While Talent Development increased the rate of promotion to tenth grade, those students in Talent Development schools who were required to repeat a full year of ninth grade were more likely to drop out of high school than their counterparts in other schools. Different grouping arrangements and modes of instruction may be needed for such students.
This Issue Focus is adapted from Meeting Five Critical Challenges of High School Reform: Lessons on Research from Three Reform Models by Janet Quint, published by MDRC in May 2006.
Key Documents
Making Progress Toward Graduation: Evidence from the Talent Development High School Model by James J. Kemple, Corinne Herlihy, and Thomas J. Smith (2005)
The Challenge of Scaling Up Educational Reform: Findings and Lessons from First Things First by Janet Quint, Howard S. Bloom, Alison Rebeck Black, and LaFleur Stephens with Theresa M. Akey (2005)
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