Rates of chronic absenteeism are at record-high levels. More than 1 in 4 students missed 10 percent or more of the 2021-22 school year. That means millions of students missed out on regular instruction, not to mention the social and emotional benefits of interacting with peers and trusted adults.

Moreover, two-thirds of the nation’s students attended a school where chronic absence rates reached at least 20 percent. Such levels disrupt entire school communities, including the students who are regularly attending.

The scope and scale of this absenteeism crisis necessitate the implementation of the next generation of student support.

Fortunately, a recent study suggests a promising path for getting students back in school and back on track to graduation. A group of nearly 50 middle and high schools saw reductions in chronic absenteeism and course failure rates after one year of harnessing the twin powers of data and relationships.

From the 2021-22 to 2022-23 school years, the schools’ chronic absenteeism rates dropped by 5.4 percentage points, and the share of students failing one or more courses went from 25.5 percent to 20.5 percent. In the crucial ninth grade, course failure rates declined by 9.2 percentage points.

These encouraging results come from the first cohort of rural and urban schools and communities partnering with the GRAD Partnership, a collective of nine organizations, to grow  the use of “student success systems” into a common practice.

Student success systems take an evidence-based approach to organizing school communities to better support the academic progress and well-being of all students.

They were developed with input from hundreds of educators and build on the successes of earlier student support efforts — like early warning systems and on-track initiatives — to meet students’ post-pandemic needs.

Related: Widen your perspective. Our free biweekly newsletter consults critical voices on innovation in education.

Importantly, student success systems offer schools a way to identify school, grade-level and classroom factors that impact attendance; they then deliver timely supports to meet individual students’ needs. They do this, in part, by explicitly valuing supportive relationships and responding to the insights that students and the adults who know them bring to the table.

Valuable relationships include not only those between students and teachers, and schools and families, but also those among peer groups and within the entire school community. Schools cannot address the attendance crisis without rebuilding and fostering these relationships.

When students feel a sense of connection to school they are more likely to show up.

For some students, this connection comes through extracurricular activities like athletics, robotics or band. For others, it may be a different connection to school.

Schools haven’t always focused on connections in a concrete way, partly because relationships can feel fuzzy and hard to track. We’re much better at tracking things like grades and attendance.

Still, schools in the GRAD Partnership cohort show that it can be done.

These schools established “student success teams” of teachers, counselors and others. The teams meet regularly to look at up-to-date student data and identify and address the root causes of absenteeism with insight and input from families and communities, as well as the students themselves.

The teams often use low-tech relationship-mapping tools to help identify students who are disconnected from activities or mentors. One school’s student success team used these tools to ensure that all students were connected to at least one activity — and even created new clubs for students with unique interests. Their method was one that any school could replicate —collaborating on a Google spreadsheet.

Another school identified students who would benefit from a new student mentoring program focused on building trusting relationships.

Related: PROOF POINTS: The chronic absenteeism puzzle

Some schools have used surveys of student well-being to gain insight on how students feel about school, themselves and life in general — and have then used the information to develop supports.

And in an example of building supportive community relationships, one of the GRAD Partnership schools worked with local community organizations to host a resource night event at which families were connected on the spot to local providers who could help them overcome obstacles to regular attendance — such as medical and food needs, transportation and housing issues and unemployment.

Turning the tide against our current absenteeism crisis does not have a one-and-done solution — it will involve ongoing collaborative efforts guided by data and grounded in relationships that take time to build.

Without these efforts, the consequences will be severe both for individual students and our country as a whole.

Robert Balfanz is a research professor at the Center for Social Organization of Schools at Johns Hopkins University School of Education, where he is the director of the Everyone Graduates Center.

This story about post-pandemic education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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New data released this week from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, known as the “nation’s report card,” should raise the alarm for America’s high schools. While scores declined across the board, eighth grade students showed the most stunning drops — underscoring the urgent task ahead for high schools charged with helping students get back on track.

In both math and reading, scores declined to levels unseen in the last two decades. The drops were particularly sharp in math, where just 26 percent of eighth grade students were deemed “proficient.”

Those students are now freshmen in high school. As ninth graders, they are in the midst of a critical transition year, one that research shows plays a powerful role in their ability to succeed in high school and beyond. If high schools don’t act urgently and decisively to provide students with the support they need, the consequences could be felt for years to come.

But while the task facing high schools is daunting, this is no time for hand-wringing. Our decades of experience helping high schools improve give us hope that most schools have within their reach the tools and strategies they need to meet the challenge.

Given the unprecedented level of student need reflected by the NAEP score report, we must rethink how high schools organize, implement and refine their strategies to support students. High schools should be laser-focused on three key things: actionable data, supportive relationships and a collective and evidence-based approach to student support. When these three elements are brought together, they create a student success system.

Student success systems help schools identify and prioritize areas of student need and can alleviate the burden on teachers and school leaders. Independent research has shown that, when done well, student success systems improve teachers’ collaboration with their peers and their use of data while reducing students’ chronic absenteeism and course failure.

In both math and reading, scores declined to levels unseen in the last two decades.

A systemic and intensive focus on data, relationships and evidence-based support can help meet the current challenges. Real-time data helps schools pinpoint where students are struggling; a focus on relationships increases students’ school engagement after two years of pandemic disconnection; and an evidence-based approach supports all students, particularly the large number currently shown to be off-track.

Absenteeism skyrocketed during the pandemic, with more than 70 percent of schools reporting increases in chronic student absenteeism. Absences are a major signal that a student is at risk of not graduating. Yet too often, schools don’t have the systems in place to take action when a student starts missing multiple days of school.

With a student success system in place, however, staff are alerted if a student misses multiple days of school. Teachers or other staff reach out to the student and their family. (Some school districts are using federal relief funds to pay for home visits and direct engagement with missing or struggling students.)

Such a focus on relationships reframes how schools recognize and respond to student needs. Instead of pushing students toward “remediation,” adults get to know them as people and can better identify the supports they need to succeed.

Related: PROOF POINTS: Several surprises in gloomy NAEP report

A high school in New Mexico, for example, coordinates conferences for students who’ve been identified as needing support with the aim of identifying the root causes of their struggles and suggesting solutions for getting them back on track. The conferences, attended by the students, their caregivers, teachers and a support coordinator, could easily feel intimidating and punitive. Yet the school begins each one with a deep dive into the student’s strengths and positive contributions.

This reframing serves teachers, too. Schools shift from a culture of isolation to one of collective support and shared responsibility. When a student is struggling in math, for example, it is an opportunity for a community of educators to find a solution, rather than just one math teacher.

This collective approach is critical given the current level of student need brought on by the pandemic. Current school supports weren’t designed to meet the depth of academic and mental health challenges many students are facing.  

Asking teachers to catch up each student on their own will only get schools so far and will quickly lead to burn out. High schools need strategies to reach large groups of students and strategically tap community resources.

For example, if a school’s ninth graders are lacking basic math skills, educators could schedule extra time to focus on building those skills, leverage tutors from the community and ask other teachers, such as science teachers, to reinforce key math concepts in their own curricula.

The nation’s report card shows that high schools face immense pressure to help a generation of learners overcome the effects of the pandemic. The stakes could not be higher, and business as usual will not suffice.

By prioritizing data and relationships and taking a collective approach to student support, high schools can build systems that meet the current level of need and keep more students on track to graduation and postsecondary success.

Robert Balfanz is the director of the Everyone Graduates Center at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education.

Angela Jerabek is the founder and executive director of the BARR Center (Building Assets, Reducing Risks), a national school improvement organization based in Minneapolis. Both are members of the GRAD Partnership for Student Success.

This story about the NAEP score report was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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While the high-school graduation rate is being celebrated at a record high, many school districts are grappling with a much different reality.

Kids in struggling communities and socially isolated neighborhoods far too often follow a predictable pattern: They miss some school, get in some trouble, and soon find themselves failing courses. If they fail too many, they are held back and asked to try again under the same conditions. The next step is often a stint in an alternative or virtual school before they leave school without a diploma.

At a time when little to no work exists for a high school dropout to support a family, the community, as a result, falls deeper into despair. But this pattern is preventable — even in the toughest schools. Take Noe Castro’s story.

Related: Why placing students in difficult high-school classes may increase college enrollment

Four years ago, Castro never dreamed that he would graduate from high school — much less college. He carried too big a burden for a teenager: His parents had split up, his mom was ill, his dad wasn’t around, and he was working late nights at a gas station. Castro was on the fast track to dropping out. What made the difference was that someone at his high school stepped in before it was too late.

At 14, Castro was identified as a student in danger of dropping out of San Antonio’s Burbank High School. He was paired with a mentor who regularly checked in with him, and he received one-on-one tutoring. With the additional help, he forged through school, graduating in 2016. He hopes to eventually earn a kinesiology degree.

Noe’s trajectory was changed due to committed teachers and administrators working with Diplomas Now, a nonprofit partnership that identifies who will drop out based on a student’s poor attendance, behavior and course performance. Our research shows that sixth and ninth graders who are deficient in one of these three areas are two to three times more likely to drop out than their peers.

Three partner organizations complete the Diplomas Now model: City Year, an AmeriCorps organization that puts recent college grads in schools to provide one-on-one mentoring and tutoring for kids with early-warning indicators; Talent Development Secondary, a Johns Hopkins program that develops school improvement models and support for teachers; and Communities In Schools, which provides social workers who help students with the greatest needs. Through the process, the students’ early-warning indicators are tracked and periodically revised.

Related: Can ‘Sober High’ schools keep teenagers off drugs?

How does Diplomas Now perform on a larger scale? That question is at the center of an ongoing randomized control trial study involving 62 underserved schools in 11 urban districts from Boston to Los Angeles.

In 2010, Diplomas Now won a $30 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education to implement and study the model in middle and high schools.

These schools are among the nation’s most challenged: More than 90 percent of the 40,000 students qualified for free and reduced priced lunch, more than 60 percent were not proficient in math and English, a third had missed a month or more of school, a third had been suspended and a third were too old for their grade.

An independent study shows promise: After just two years, Diplomas Now had successfully reduced these signs at a statistically significant rate better than the study’s comparison schools. That’s good news because the United States is at a critical moment in the effort to improve schools where too many students continue to struggle.

Related: NYC’s bold gamble: Spend big on impoverished students’ social and emotional needs to get academic gains

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) returns the responsibility for school improvement to states and districts, but the new law still comes with a few requirements. Districts must use evidence-based reforms in the lowest performing schools — and a portion of Title I dollars has been set aside to help. Moreover, despite moves by Congress to rescind federal accountability rules crafted to help states implement ESSA, care was taken in the language of the law to define what is meant by evidence. “Strong evidence” is defined as at least one randomized control trial with a positive, statistically significant impact on student outcomes.

That requirement seems straightforward enough. The catch, though, is that such studies are extremely difficult to come by. Only about one in 10 such studies in education achieves such outcomes. But with the latest findings, evidence backing early-warning systems is building.

So where do we go from here? For districts that adopt early-warning systems and evidence-based models like Diplomas Now to support their lowest performing schools, it should mean lower dropout rates — thus more productive communities. And most important, for struggling students, it will mean more veer from the path of dropping out toward one of walking the stage at graduation, on track toward a successful future.

After all, shouldn’t success stories like Noe Castro’s be the rule for kids in high-poverty schools — not the exception?

Robert Balfanz is a research professor at the Center for the Social Organization of Schools at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Education, and the co-founder of Diplomas Now.

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