The Make-or-Break Year: Solving the Dropout Crisis One Ninth Grader at a Time

For decades, ninth graders entering Chicago's public high schools were as likely to drop out as they were to graduate. Then, between 2006 and 2016, the city's graduation rate jumped from 57 to 74 percent. Phillips (formerly, communications director, Univ. of Chicago Consortium on Sch. Research) explains how researchers, teachers, and others worked to transform the city's graduation rate into a subject of national interest. This story turns conventional wisdom on its head. Researchers discovered that academically "most dropouts were virtually indistinguishable from graduates until they entered high school." Solution: create more supports to ease adolescents' transition from their close-knit K-8 experience to the more autonomous and possibly alienating environment of high school. Subsequently, the initiative Freshman OnTrack emerged; critical to its success is that teachers learned to collaborate more effectively to help at-risk students. Throughout this well-researched book, Phillips alternates between letting students and teachers speak and offering insights from academic literature and the history of educational reform movements, resulting in an engaging read.