By Eli Pristoop, Director of Attainment Analytics, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
April 28, 2025
From March 30-April 1, 450 educators, district leaders, researchers, school support professionals, and other educational stakeholders gathered in San Diego at the High Tech High Graduate School of Education for the National Summit on Improvement in Education. The Summit is an opportunity for practitioners interested in applying the principles of improvement science to education to share their approaches, get feedback from colleagues, and plan for ways to help more students succeed.
This year’s Summit featured a presentation highlighting the work of two GRAD Partnership intermediary organizations implementing student success systems in rural contexts. Gadsden Independent School District covers an area of 1,400 square miles in southern New Mexico and borders El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. The district serves 11,345 students across 26 schools, all of which are Title I designated.
Elisa Cumplido, Title I Coordinator, shared how her team within Gadsden is building on New Mexico’s Attendance for Success Act to redesign district supports for improving attendance through the model of student success systems. The new legislation shifts guidance from responding to absences with punitive measures to a focus on prevention and intervention. Some of the changes they are implementing include structured needs assessments, consistent processes around data collection and review, root cause analysis to craft interventions, and the cultivation of a district-wide culture centered on attendance and restorative approaches with student-centered mindsets. While they are relatively early in their redesign and implementation journey, Gadsden achieved a five percentage point reduction in chronic absenteeism in their first year of the district level attendance support team’s work.
North State Together is a cradle to career collective impact organization supporting 10 county networks in far northern California. The region they serve is largely rural and roughly the size of the states of New Jersey, Hawaii, Connecticut, Delaware, Vermont, and Rhode Island combined. Susan Schroth, Director of North State Together’s GRAD Partnership work based at Shasta College, shared how their ten high school network values learning not only from one another, but also with other rural intermediaries, like the University of West Alabama and schools across the GRAD Partnership network.
Susan shared insights on establishing partnerships with all ten high schools upon the launch of the cohort in the 2022-2023 academic year, and the importance of in-person visits despite the distance. Her presentation also highlighted Burney High School in Shasta County. While traditionally tight-knit, Burney struggled emerging from COVID, with weakened relationships contributing to a rise in chronic absenteeism, reaching 50% prior to partnering with North State Together and the GRAD Partnership.
Building off of resources originally accessed through The GRAD Partnership, Burney decided to focus on supportive relationships and student centered mindsets. They surveyed students about their top reasons for attending school and used that information to co-create solutions. In their first year of working with North State Together, Burney saw a 20 percentage point drop in chronic absenteeism, followed by another 6 percentage point reduction the following year. Using the student success systems framework to focus on school connectedness has helped create a positive spark for school leaders in addition to students, and created a platform to celebrate the good that is happening at their school.
Through the GRAD Partnership, Gadsden Independent School District receives support and training from Talent Development Secondary, and North State Together receives similar assistance from American Institutes for Research. Beyond this session, the work of many other GRAD Partnership core member organizations was highlighted including a plenary session summarizing the key achievements of the improvement field that featured the impact The Network for College Success, The CORE Districts, and RISE Network have all had on improving on-track rates.
Improvement science and student success systems are mutually reinforcing frameworks that can be applied to achieve a variety of goals related to school improvement and student attainment. We are grateful for all our partners that are taking opportunities to tell the stories of how this work is coming to life in their local communities.