Guide to Identifying Feeder Schools to Increase Graduation Rates

America's Promise Alliance recently announced the release of a guide to understanding school feeder patterns released by three of its partners: United Way Worldwide, Civic Enterprises, and Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University. Entitled "Solving the High School Graduation Crisis: Identifying and Using School Feeder Patterns in Your Community," the guide seeks to provide local United Ways and their communities with a process for identifying local feeder patterns to support efforts to improve academic achievement.

While much recent attention has been paid to the country's high schools with the largest proportion of students who are failing academically or dropping out of school, the authors note that it is important to identify and support the students most in need of support before they even reach high school. To assist in those efforts, they developed this guide to help communities understand which elementary and middle schools "feed," or send, students to their lowest performing schools.

The authors suggest working with community members to first identify the lowest performing high schools in the community and then identifying the middle and elementary schools that send students to those schools. They recommend starting with the lowest performing high schools, rather than trying to create a map for every high school, because this will make the process more manageable and also help your community to identify and provide support to the students at greatest risk of poor academic performance or dropping out of school altogether.

The guide provides assistance in:

• Understanding your education landscape - This includes identifying the people and organizations that work in or with the school system. These stakeholders can include school principals and the superintendents. The guide also provides a list of data sources that your community can use to obtain key information about the education landscape in your community.
• Identifying Feeder School Patterns in Your Community - In addition to providing tips and examples, this section offers a short checklist that your local United Way and community can use to determine your readiness to identify local school feeder patterns.
• Using Feeder Patterns for Greater Impact - After your community has identified your local feeder patterns, you can use this part of the guide to help start thinking about how to use the data you've gained to impact student achievement. One option is to focus on what Diplomas Now, a collaboration of organizations that has developed an early warning system, calls the ABC's: Attendance, Behavior, and Course Passing and grades. This data can be used to develop a tiered approach to intervention at the school level that includes a mix of school-wide efforts and more targeted support, such as case management, for the students who are most in need. This section includes an example of how a local United Way in Phoenix piloted an early warning system.
• Implications for Public Policy - The guide concludes with some examples of the types of state and local policies that might be able to support your community's work to improve academic achievement.

For more information on this guide, including access to an archived webinar featuring Robert Balfanz of the Everyone Graduates Center, please visit here.

Recommendations for Successful District Summer Learning Programs

While summer is nearing its end, and kids across the country are heading back to school, it is not too early to start thinking about how your school district can plan a successful summer learning program. Earlier this month, the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit focused on public policy research and analysis, released a research brief entitled "How to Get the Most out of a Summer Learning Program" that presents a set of recommendations for making school district summer learning programs as effective as possible.

Research has shown that, over the course of the summer, students often lose some of the skills and knowledge they gained during the previous academic year. While this phenomenon, termed “summer learning loss”, affects most students, it can be particularly harmful for low-income students. Combined with the other challenges, such as a lack of positive activities, many children in low-income neighborhoods face during the summer, the presence of summer learning loss has led some school districts to look at how summer learning programs can reduce, if not reverse, summer learning loss.

The research brief draws on findings from a recently published RAND report entitled “Getting to Work on Summer Learning: Recommended Practices for Success."  That report is the second in a five-part series that is exploring best practices in summer learning programs by sharing the results of a demonstration project taking place in five large urban school districts: Boston, Cincinnati, Dallas, Duval County (Florida), Pittsburgh, and Rochester (New York).

Based on hundreds of surveys, interviews, and hours of direct observation of summer learning programs, the RAND researchers made several recommendations for school districts and organizations working to implement a summer learning program in areas such as planning, staff selection and training, and the tracking of program costs. Selected recommendations include:

• Commit to having a summer program by January.
• Establish firm enrollment deadlines and keep electronic student records.
• Develop a rigorous selection processes to recruit motivated teachers.
• Keep in mind that it is not necessary to disguise academics to boost attendance.
• Anchor the program in a commercially available and evidence-based curriculum.
• Operate the program for five to six weeks. 
• Schedule three to four hours a day for academics and focus on academic content during those hours.
• Put resources into tracking and boosting attendance.

While the researchers caution that these are not "proven practices" - the academic performance of the students in the programs they are studying through the demonstration project is currently being evaluated - they are evidence-based and provide the best guidance on summer learning programs that is available at this time.

For more information on this summer learning program research, please visit RAND’s website to view the research brief or the full report.