Freshman on Track Resources

The Butterfly Strategy: Some students were not fully disengaged, but they were missing school in a repeated weekly pattern that broad incentives did not solve. 

Michigan Rural Districts:  Students were missing school because of family responsibilities, work obligations, transportation challenges, poverty, homelessness, low connection to school, and difficulty seeing how attendance connected to their future. 

Watonga- Tribes & School Connection: the article identifies deeper causes such as generational distrust rooted in boarding school history, lack of basic resources, transportation barriers, bullying, cultural misunderstanding, and students not always feeling welcomed or valued in school. 

Colorado Chronic Absenteeism: Garfield Re 2 needed to recover from high post pandemic absence and rebuild student engagement, especially through stronger systems for attendance monitoring, reengagement, and wraparound supports. 

Virginia Chronic Absenteeism: Chronic absenteeism in Virginia doubled after the pandemic, and schools needed a clearer, more accountable way to identify attendance challenges, support high need divisions, and measure progress.

Community Rooted Strategies Drive Attendance Gains: Memphis charter schools were facing high chronic absence, shaped by transportation, housing, mental health, family trust, and school connection challenges. 

Get 2 School. You Can Make It!: Cleveland needed to move away from a court centered truancy response and address the connection between missed school, academic outcomes, and graduation.  

Improving K-12 Student Attendance Requires a Team Effort: Districts can combat persistent chronic absenteeism by moving away from punitive measures and instead building cross-sector partnerships with families, community groups, and local agencies to address the root out-of-school causes of missed instructional time.

Engaging Parents in Preventing Chronic Absence: Toolkit outlines how to work with families to improve student achievement and attendance. 

Reducing Chronic Absence for American Indian and Alaska Native Students: High levels of chronic absence are a red flag and reveal the urgent need to partner with AI/AN students, families, and communities to understand and address the challenges they face in attending and thriving in school. 

High School Students With Reading Comprehension Difficulties: Ninth- and tenth-grade students had significant reading comprehension problems and failed prior state accountability measures.

Southeast Lauderdale: Students were at school but not consistently connected to something beyond academics, which weakened engagement and belonging.

Anderson & West Valley: Attendance was relatively strong, but course performance was a challenge, especially for 9th and 10th graders.

Southern Trinity: Students were at risk of disconnecting from school because of isolation, limited opportunities, and the pull of distance learning. 

Fall River: Some students needed stronger reasons and supports to attend, participate, and feel connected to school.

Pickens County High School: Students needed targeted support for attendance, behavior, course performance, and connectedness, including students who were not completing work.

Restoring the Pride of Wellton: The school faced serious behavior concerns, including fights, cell phone distraction, sleeping in class, poor attention, and low academic accountability.

Boosting School Spirit by Holding Students Accountable: Students needed stronger accountability for attendance, academics, and behavior in a school culture with low spirit.

The Tools of Hope: School pride, behavior, attendance, and participation needed improvement.

Effective Student Supports: Some students were identified as behavioral outliers or students in pain, with needs connected to behavior, attendance, course performance, connectedness, and mental health.

College and Career Opportunities: Students who flagged in attendance, behavior, course performance, or connectedness needed stronger support to stay on track. 

Improving K-12 Math Instruction through "train the trainer" Model: Ohio needed to improve math instruction after pandemic disruptions and help educators shift from procedural math toward deeper mathematical understanding and student-centered problem solving.

Taking Reading Apprenticeship to Scale: Secondary teachers often lacked a shared way to teach students how experts read and think in each discipline. 

Transforming Learning for ELLs with Personalized, Competenncy-Based Education: English learners and other high school students needed mastery-based support rather than seat-time pacing and course failure.

Evidence of Deeper Learning Outcomes: Many high schools needed instruction that builds content mastery, problem-solving, collaboration, engagement, and graduation readiness.

Using Problems with Obstacles to Promote Rigorous Learning: Presenting students with a variety of routine and nonroutine problems will help them build the skills they need to navigate their future careers.

What is Rigorous Learning?: The Core Collaborative author consultant and thought leader, Dr. Michael McDowell shares how he redefines rigorous learning and the three types of learning; surface, deep, and transfer.

Rigor is More Than Hard Work: In this article, educational experts Nancy Frey and Douglas Fisher explain that true academic rigor is not about burying students in extra work, but rather about strategically balancing task difficulty with cognitive complexity to elevate learning for everyone.

Redefining Rigor in the Classroom: In this session, thought leaders James Marshall and Nancy Frey provide a new definition for rigor, one focused on five indicators designed to help identify teacher strengths, areas for growth and concrete ways to continuously improve your teaching practice.

Six Ways to Add Rigor by Deepening Thinking: Ninth- and tenth-grade students had significant reading comprehension problems and failed prior state accountability measures.

High School Students With Reading Comprehension Difficulties: Ninth- and tenth-grade students had significant reading comprehension problems and failed prior state accountability measures.

High School Students With Reading Comprehension Difficulties: Ninth- and tenth-grade students had significant reading comprehension problems and failed prior state accountability measures.

High School Students With Reading Comprehension Difficulties: Ninth- and tenth-grade students had significant reading comprehension problems and failed prior state accountability measures.

Going Beyond High School Credit Recovery in Summer Learning: Manchester High School students needed credit recovery, but the traditional model did not address why students had struggled during the year, including disconnection from coursework and peers. 

From Remediation to Acceleration: Oakland high school students needed credit recovery after COVID worsened unfinished learning and traditional summer credit recovery was too passive.

Teaching the Way Students Learn Best: Many students entered high school well below proficiency, creating serious risk for weak credit accrual, delayed graduation, and limited postsecondary access.

Teaching for Powerful Lessons: Gateway served a high percentage of students with learning differences, students of color, and low income students, with more than half of incoming students reading below grade level when they began middle school.

High School Students With Reading Comprehension Difficulties: Ninth- and tenth-grade students had significant reading comprehension problems and failed prior state accountability measures.

Putting the "I" in IEP: A large, high-poverty high school needed a schoolwide instructional focus strong enough to improve achievement for many student groups.

Interventions and Progress Monitoring Toolkit: Ninth- and tenth-grade students had significant reading comprehension problems and failed prior state accountability measures.

High School Students With Reading Comprehension Difficulties: Ninth- and tenth-grade students had significant reading comprehension problems and failed prior state accountability measures.

High School Students With Reading Comprehension Difficulties: Ninth- and tenth-grade students had significant reading comprehension problems and failed prior state accountability measures.

High School Students With Reading Comprehension Difficulties: Ninth- and tenth-grade students had significant reading comprehension problems and failed prior state accountability measures.