10 The Hampton Roads Messenger Our Education


BY ALYSON BRYANT Long before students have even


entered ninth grade, teachers are looking to detailed data to figure out which kids are most likely to drop out of high school. Though this flagging system can call attention to a need for additional help to a potential dropout, there may be concerns, like inaccurate predictions, or worse, lowered expectations.


At Clinton Middle School


in East Los Angeles, teachers are using a system called Early Warning Indicators, or EWI, which is part of a school transformation program called Diplomas Now, currently used in 14 cities around the country. The system is based on recent research


Volume 8 Number 11


Flagging Kids In Early Grades as "At Risk" -- Does It Help or Harm?


out of Johns Hopkins University that shows what specific factors best predict the likelihood of dropping out of high school. The warning system uses three data points – suspensions or behavior, attendance, and grades in middle school — to identify kids at risk of not making it to high school graduation. According to an op-ed written by Diplomas Now in the New York Times, in the 2012-13 school year, “the program achieved a 41 percent reduction in chronically absent students, a 70 percent reduction in suspended students, a 69 percent reduction in students failing English and a 52 percent reduction in students failing math.”


Here’s how it works: After reviewing the trends, the teachers


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examine students’ names that are colored red or yellow, considered off-track or in danger of being off-track. At Clinton, signs of being off-track include coming to school less than 85 percent of the time, getting a bad behavior grade, or an F in any class. Students who show two or more of these signs are flagged.


The teachers then discuss the


circumstances around each student, things like how often he or she visits the nurse, or what’s going on in the family. Then they brainstorm interventions. These can be simple, like saving an extra breakfast for a student, or more involved, like assigning tutoring or Saturday school.


Though teachers have always


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kept students’ needs in mind when grades have dipped or behavior has changed, typically those decisions were made within the teacher’s own classroom. Teachers don’t always know what’s going on in the classroom next door, and it’s fairly rare to have time carved out of the school day just to problem-solve around student data. Likewise, students often don’t realize that teachers are paying attention to their personal lives.


At Clinton, a student doing


poorly in math class is every teacher’s problem, because that student is considered more likely to drop out. The faculty meets every month, hoping that within a month, they can bump a student back on-track — a process they call “recovery.”


But does being off-track


definitely mean that a student will drop out? The kids interviewed at Clinton are in seventh grade and only 12 years old. Can data accurately predict if one


of them is going to drop out of high school five years down the line?


That’s a question Chris West is


wrestling with, based on his work developing an Early Warning Indicator system for Montgomery County Schools in Maryland. His system flagged “at-risk” students as young as first grade. One of his concerns is whether all this information can even be acted upon. He found that 76 percent of the students who dropped out had these warning indicators, but 47.4 percent of the non-dropouts had these indicators, too. What’s the risk of “mis-predicting”?


Ultimately, West said if you


identify someone incorrectly, but they still show signs of disengagement, the effects of intervening could still be positive.


There’s another concern about


these early flagging systems. What if knowing that certain kids are on the “at-risk” list colors the way teachers see them, and they start to expect less? Or what if the students start to expect less of themselves?


David Yeager, an adolescent


psychologist at the University of Texas, worries that early warning systems could undermine a student’s resilience. “What if what’s the cure for under-performance in middle school becomes a disease when they move on to college, because they’ve been told they can’t do it on their own?” he said.


At Clinton, the students don’t


necessarily know that they’ve been flagged. Principal Sissi O’Reilly said that her staff never uses the term “at-risk” to describe students. And because the teachers are intervening as soon as a student slips up, the


FLAGGING KIDS PAGE 14


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