Fascinating efforts get students over the finish line

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Dear reader,

If you know any recent college graduates, you’ve probably seen photos of them in their caps and gowns, grinning with pride and relief. Yet only six in 10 people who enroll in a four-year college graduate within six years; numbers are far lower for low-income and minority students.

I heard stories behind these dire statistics at the Complete College America convening in Arizona last month, but I also learned about fascinating new efforts to help students get over the elusive finish line. Here’s one, focused on older students at John Jay College, via our “Proof Points” columnist Jill Barshay. What other new ideas are working? Reply to this email to tell us what you know.

Liz Willen, Editor

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Main Idea

A ‘wildly intrusive’ way to help older college students get their degrees

An experiment at John Jay College to get seniors over the final hurdle to graduation is worth watching.

Reading List

A charter chain thinks it has the answer for alternative schools

Altus Schools in Southern California uses a controversial online platform, but pairs it with small student-teacher ratios and other support.

“Kids who have less, need more”: The fight over school funding

A child who shows promise struggles to make it in middle school as state and national leaders debate if the country is doing enough to educate vulnerable students.

School network takes turbocharged approach to education for refugee students

Fugees Academy, perhaps the nation’s only school to serve refugees exclusively, tries to pack three years of English into one school year.

Most English lessons on Teachers Pay Teachers and other sites are ‘mediocre’ or ‘not worth using,’ study finds

Experts reviewed the most-downloaded units and lessons in high school English on three websites (Teachers Pay Teachers, ReadWriteThink and Share My Lesson) and rated their quality. A majority of the materials were rated 0 or 1 on a 0-3 quality scale.

OPINION: What if students returned to the same teachers the next year?

Looping allows teachers to stay with their group of students year after year as they progress from one grade-level to the next.

Solutions

"The quest to help traumatized children learn," The Philadelphia School Notebook
"Speech club helps Utah prison inmates tell their stories," Salt Lake Tribune
"How to Save a Dying Language," The Atlantic

This week’s solutions section came from SolutionsU powered by Solutions Journalism Network and their database of solutions journalism. Search for more solutions.

👋 Contact Nichole Dobo at [email protected] to give feedback on The Hechinger Report’s newsletters. Did you know we produce newsletters on early childhood, education research, the future of learning, higher education and the state of Mississippi? And it helps us if you recommend our newsletters to a friend.

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