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Districts and Schools

Student success systems provide schools with a unified system that integrates, extends, and increases the capacity of existing student support efforts, including early warning, on-track, and multi-tiered support systems.

Partner with us to plan, implement, and sustain high-quality student success systems so that middle and high schools are empowered to graduate all students ready for the future.

Multiple types of technical assistance and training are available that can be tailored to your needs.

The GRAD Partnership is currently working with over 250 schools and districts across the nation. Contact us to learn more and get involved.

FAQs

Why are student success systems so important?

There are a small number of indicators that are highly predictive of school success including grade promotion, high school graduation and postsecondary readiness.

Evidence and experience in a wide range of schools shows that when schools constantly monitor progress for all students on these key indicators, and create human systems using insights from teachers, students themselves, and parents to identify the best solutions, schools can be effective in enabling all students to succeed.

Attendance, behavior/social-emotional status, and course performance have been shown time and time again to be the key indicators.

To succeed students need to be in school, be able to focus in class, engaged with learning, and do their schoolwork. Challenges and success in any one of these areas, can impact the others.

We need to be aware this is happening and understand what’s underneath it and change or support the underlying conditions to lead to better results.

To do this work effectively, schools teams of teachers who know students well need to be able to meet and work together on a regular basis throughout the school year. There is some skill involved in making these changes cost neutral or low cost, but many schools have accomplished this and it is the type of knowledge we are seeking to spread widely with the GRAD partnership.

Schools also need to invest in initial training and professional learning typically for two years. The work advances more rapidly and successfully, when schools identify a team leader or facilitator who is responsible for organizing the student success system including the regular meetings/work sessions and data systems.

There are five key areas of work:

  1. Spreading awareness and understanding of what a high-quality student success system is and the value it brings to schools and students.
  2. Developing resources and tools to help school leadership evaluate the quality of their existing systems and identify steps to build from their current state to a high quality system.
  3. Directly partnering with school and districts to help them spread and sustain high quality student success systems in their middle and high schools.
  4. Building the capacity of more people and local organizations to be able to support schools with this work.
  5. Building infrastructure for the long term by creating learning communities, where everyone working to implement and spread high quality student success systems can work on problems together.

Typically, $20,000 to $50,000 a year for two years per school to establish a high quality student success (on-track) system. This includes the launch and training cost. There then maybe several thousand dollars a year in on-going data cost and school-based student success system team leaders or facilitators may require stipends. Most modern student-information systems have some sort of early warning/on-track module that schools can use to track the indicators and process the data (but sometimes this involves a modest annual fee).

For training and launch costs, schools should invest the federal money or aid from other sources. The training and launch costs of high- quality student success systems is less than the cost of adding an additional staff member and can support more students.

Get involved with the GRAD Partnership

Empower schools to improve and enable the educational success of all students.

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