This joint effort from NCLD, the GRAD Partnership and WestEd highlights critical barriers facing students with learning disabilities (LD) and offers a roadmap and call to action for schools, districts, and policymakers to better support high school completion and postsecondary transitions.
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.
On May 1, 2025, GRAD Partnership organizing partner, RISE Network, released a new study demonstrating the efficiency of the On-Track (Student Success) Coach strategy
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?
May 2024 EdResearch for Action brief exploring evidence on strategies to build a sense of school connectedness and engagement among all students.
What does a doubling of the number of students who are missing a month or more of schooling in the school year mean? What do the numbers tell us about the challenges our schools and communities face, and what does the evidence base say about the types of solutions and responses that are needed to meet them?
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…
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.
Student Experience Research Network reviews research on structural factors related to belonging in access to learning environments; relationships with educators, peers, and families; instructional resources and pedagogy; and system-level policies and practices.
January, 2024 Recent randomized controlled trials— the gold standard for determining the causal impact of educational interventions— have shown that student success systems generate positive results for students, schools, districts, and communities. Read our new brief to learn more about the benefits of high-quality student success systems.