How can we help students overcome obstacles and stay on track to succeed in school and to thrive?

Talent is equally distributed. Opportunity is not.

Education is a doorway through which every child in our country passes. Ensuring each student’s success has the potential to address many of our society’s most pressing challenges. Almost six million students participate in California’s public K-12 education system each year, and we invest over $130 billion annually in the process. Yet for all our efforts, the education system is not accomplishing what we need. Too many students get knocked off their course and fail to graduate high school ready for success in college or career.

Issues of equity also deeply complicate this picture. Of all the students who make it successfully to ninth grade, 86% will graduate from high school in four years. For African American students, that number drops to only 78%, meaning more than one in five African American students who enter a California high school will not graduate with their cohort. Race, socioeconomics, gender, immigration status, and disability status intersect to create compounded challenges for some students while disproportionately benefitting others.

So what sends students off course between the time they enter kindergarten and when they turn 18? The truth is that the journey from kindergarten to graduation is a fraught pathway, an Education Continuum, with huge moments of opportunity and key moments of risk. In this theme, we seek to identify key moments on that continuum that carry outsized influence on children’s likelihood of thriving in adulthood.

Having spoken to experts in education, philanthropy, and youth services, we identified several important moments that students face throughout this journey, but three areas rose to a level of vital importance: 

1. The ability to read by the end of third grade
2. The ability to navigate the challenges of 9th grade—particularly math—and progress successfully to the 10th grade, generally on track for graduation
3. The ability to navigate periods of highest risk such as housing insecurity, foster care, food insecurity, chronic absenteeism, or the juvenile justice systems

If our region did an excellent job at just these moments, we could dramatically improve the odds of success for most children. 

What's At Stake

When students learn to read, the entire future of learning is opened to them. And when students can’t read well, they are put on a crash course towards academic challenge. For low-skilled readers, every class can be a landmine filled with fear, embarrassment, and stress. The further they go in school, the more the problem compounds because the system is not built to address reading gaps in later elementary, middle, or high school. The workload keeps coming and the complexity of materials intensifies with each grade level. As the challenges grow and reading expectations increase, struggling readers can become hopeless; with no one teaching them to read the path to get back on track slips further and further from their grasp.

Image by US Department of Education is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Similarly for students who get off to a rocky start in high school, the pressure and increased academic rigor can start to weigh on students so much that they end up believing that there is no way to successfully complete high school and graduate with their peers. The beginning of high school that students experience—the preparation they come in with, the support they receive, and their early experiences of success or failure—shapes a pathway that is either bright and optimistic or filled with risk and peril. For example, students who have no more than one failing semester grade in core subjects at the end of 9th grade year are three and a half times more likely to graduate high school than students who fail two or more classes.

"In America, talent and creativity can come from anywhere, but only if we provide equitable educational opportunities to students everywhere." 

~ Dr. Miguel Cardona, former U.S. Secretary of Education

The impact of dropping out of high school is profound. According to the Social Security Administration, the lifetime earning benefit of a high school diploma is between $300,000 and $400,000. And when we consider college completion, the data is even more striking: "Men with bachelor's degrees earn approximately $900,000 more in median lifetime earnings than high school graduates. Women with bachelor's degrees earn $630,000 more." Not only can dropping out significantly affect a person's employment and earnings potential, it can have repercussions in other areas of life. Individuals who do not graduate high school, for example, are more likely to report overall poor health and chronic health conditions.

And all these paths interact and compound on each other. Imagine a student from a low-income background, who never receives evidence-based reading instruction in the early grades. Imagine this student misses the key milestone of 3rd grade literacy and nurses this reading deficit throughout the rest of elementary and middle school, hiding it as best they can out of embarrassment of being a poor reader. Then imagine this student reaching high school, unprepared for the rigor of high school math, struggling in ninth grade, failing a few courses and ending up in remedial courses in summer school with motivation waning and challenges mounting. And then imagine the issues if their family encounters a moment of housing insecurity, an immigration status crisis, or issues of substance abuse. 

Photo courtesy of College Track

What happens to that student as the path to successfully graduating high school feels less and less possible, when distractions rage, and when no one in the school is keyed into all the myriad factors this student is facing? Such a scenario, or dozens of similar permutations like it happens every day, in almost every school in our state.

Our Focus Areas

In our Education Continuum theme, we hope to identify solutions to tackle these specific three areas of opportunity—third grade literacy, ninth grade success, and life challenges—and seek bold, creative, and exciting new attempts to help kids reach these key milestones and stay on track towards graduation and life success. We will explore this theme through the following guiding question:

How can we help students overcome obstacles and stay on track to succeed in school and to thrive?

Paths not taken. Before going into more depth on each of our three priority areas, we should note that we were greatly compelled by the importance of early education and children’s educational experiences from birth to age five. Pre-school, TK (Transitional Kindergarten), and other early learning foundations are perhaps the most important element of student success. But the 0-5 education topic was so large on its own that we elected not to try to fit it into the current theme. In fact, we may return to pre-school and early education as a possible future theme.

Continue to p. 2: 3rd Grade Literacy →