As the transition point between middle and high school, ninth grade can either set a student up for long-term success or diminish a student's likelihood of graduating high school altogether. The Ninth Grade Success Initiative is a dropout prevention program, piloted in five Washington State high schools in 2019-2020. We evaluated the effects on…

Federal regulations have opened a door that allows schools to get credit under the No Child Left Behind Act for students who take longer than four years to earn a high school diploma. That option worries some education advocates, who fear it could relieve valuable pressure on high schools to graduate students on time. Under the law's…

Creating a meaningful high school diploma will expose students to the full range of adult options which will enable them to shape their high school education in a way that connects to their current interests and stimulates the growth of new ones. Fully connecting all students to these four worlds of knowledge will equip them to build one…

One Washington state school district uses mariachi music lessons to engage Hispanic students in school and deter them from dropping out. The district's dropout rate is very low, despite its high Hispanic population. Students in the top-performing mariachi groups say that participating has motivated them academically. Just as mariachi has…

This paper summarizes investigations of school connectedness completed by the Social Development Research Group in two longitudinal studies, the Seattle Social Development Project and Raising Healthy Children. The theoretical importance of school connectedness, empirical support for the theoretical propositions of the impact of school…