Despite research showing that recovery high schools help students stay clean and earn diplomas, the often costly programs remain small-scale and rare.

At their hometown high schools, they were dropouts, bad kids, problems. At home, they lied to their parents, stole from their siblings or sneaked out to get high. Sometimes, they tried drug treatment, but surrounded by their old crowd, they quickly relapsed. These are the students of recovery high schools: addicts who hit bottom excruciatingly […]

Diversifying gifted and talented programs represents only the first step in expanding access, educators say. Districts also must retain those students—and that means ensuring their experiences are positive.

Look at a graph of the racial and ethnic makeup of the nation's typical gifted and talented program over the past 25 years, and the lines are mostly flat. Whites and Asians remain overrepresented relative to their numbers in the population.

Five years ago, the lack of diversification in the gifted and talented program in Minnesota’s Mankato Area Public Schools illustrated a nationwide problem. African-American, Native American, Latino and low-income students remained severely underrepresented relative to their numbers in the district’s population. In response, administrators overhauled the way they identified high-potential learners, drawing on research into […]

Every school district in the country could reduce student absenteeism by 10 to 15 percent immediately—and it wouldn’t even cost that much, Harvard Public Policy Professor Todd Rogers says. The intervention Rogers and his team developed, which he says researchers have validated in randomized experiments involving tens of thousands of students in more than a […]

Greene County Career Center (Ohio) Initiative: A truancy interventionist helps students cope with life challenges such as daycare for their children, homelessness and driving parents to chemotherapy appointments. Result: Truancy court referrals fell from 24 to one in just two years. Meriden Public Schools (Conn.) Initiative: District leaders asked school-based behavioral teams to monitor attendance. […]

Years ago, it was easy for districts to ignore what high average daily-attendance numbers can conceal: kids, sometimes lots of them, who miss weeks of school every year. The 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act has changed that calculus. For the first time, the law requires states to report chronic-absenteeism rates, and more than two-thirds of […]