AllAgencyAttendanceBelongingConnectednessCourse PerformanceRelationshipsResearchToolsWell-being

Landscape Analysis of Effective Chronic Absenteeism Interventions

A Better Chicago: Addressing Chronic Absenteeism in Chicago (September, 2025) summarizes what is known about reducing chronic absenteeism, and notes that student success systems are an effective solution and a core part of any comprehensive intervention. Findings also highlight the critical role of school connectedness, and collaboration across an ecosystem of schools, partners, and communities working together to support students.

Delivering Success: The GRAD Partnership Year Two Results

Schools implementing student success systems with GRAD Partnership support continue to achieve substantial progress in reducing chronic absenteeism and course failure rates — two strong predictors of high school graduation and postsecondary success. After two years of implementation work, schools, on average, experienced a 32% decline in the percent of students failing one or more courses, and a 28% decline in chronically absent students.

The Inside Story of the National Graduation Campaign

A 20-year campaign to address America’s high school dropout crisis produced unprecedented gains in graduation rates nationwide. Can lessons from this campaign help the nation cross this elusive threshold and inspire action on other social issues?

Off to a Strong Start: The GRAD Partnership Year 1 Results

Year one of the GRAD Partnership’s implementation of student success systems, the next generation of early warning/on-track systems, occurred in the year following what many teachers and school leaders called the most challenging year of their career. Data from the first cohort of the GRAD Partnership schools indicates that student success systems were up to the challenge: Schools working with the GRAD Partnership to implement student success systems saw fewer course failures and reductions in chronic absenteeism. Read the research brief to learn more about the real, tangible, and meaningful ways student success system implementation benefitted students across the…

Why is School Connectedness So Important?

This short post from 2018 summarizes what the authors found in their systematic research review on school connectedness, which aimed to define school connectedness and identify the relationship of four factors (attending, belonging, engaging, and flow) to connectedness. The blog post clearly lays out what looks connectedness looks like, and offers guidance for schools to encourage it, and the literature review takes a deeper, more theoretical approach towards the development of a model of school connectedness.

Skip to content