Today’s post comes from Briana Kerensky at our National office.
When a student makes the choice to drop out of school, it鈥檚 not usually a spur-of-the-moment decision. Years of academic, financial and social struggles often weigh a young person down, and by the time a student is of legal age to quit the classroom, he or she may have long ago abandoned any hope of getting a diploma.
How young are these kids when their derailment from the road to graduation begins? A new study released last week shows that the warning signs begin right when a child is still in elementary school: third grade.
The study, 鈥淒ouble Jeopardy: How Third-Grade Reading Skills and Poverty Influence High School Graduation,鈥� revealed that a student who cannot read on grade level by the third grade is four times less likely to graduate by age 19 than a child who reads capably by that time. If poverty is factored into the reason a child is struggling to read, that student is 13 times less likely to graduate on time.
Why does third grade seem to be the critical age to measure a student鈥檚 potential success? Previous studies have suggested that students begin to fall away from their projected graduation date around the sixth grade.
鈥淭hird grade is a kind of pivot point,鈥� said Donald J. Hernandez, the study鈥檚 author and a sociology professor at Hunter College, at the City University of New York. 鈥淲e teach reading for the first three grades and then after that children are not so much learning to read but using their reading skills to learn other topics. In that sense if you haven鈥檛 succeeded by third grade it鈥檚 more difficult to [remediate] than it would have been if you started before then.鈥�
Communities In Schools doesn鈥檛 wait for a teenager to be on the verge of dropping out to provide him or her with vital services like academic support, counseling, food and clothes. We work with students from kindergarten through senior year of high school to make sure they never feel like they鈥檙e on a precipice. Our site coordinators make sure children have mentors, health care, social workers, after-school programs and whatever else they need to help them do well in school and graduate on time.
In fact, Communities In Schools鈥� five-year evaluation results confirmed the success of our model at not only reducing dropout rates and increasing graduation rates, but resulting in a higher percentage of students reaching proficiency in 4th-grade and 8th-grade level reading and math.
By doing our best to identify students struggling in the classroom early on, Communities In Schools prevents kids from falling off the edge and becoming dropout statistics.