Texas: Dropout intervention results promising

At its January meeting, the Texas P-16 council heard a presentation on the Texas Education Agency (TEA)'s Dropout Recovery Pilot Program. The short summary of the presentation on the Texas P-16 Council Web site provides more details about some of these key features, including:

• Recruiting--actively seeking out recent dropouts rather than waiting for them to find the program
• Flexible scheduling--providing a flexible school day and year, which is so necessary for dropouts juggling work and family obligations. This ECS brief provides more details about these elements of the Texas initiative
• Accelerated academics--including credit recovery and self-paced, online credit attainment
• Social supports to address other barriers to coming to school, such as "case management; childcare ...; transportation or bus tickets, bikes; clothing; food assistance"
• Transitions to postsecondary--returning dropouts may have college as their goal, but no direction on how to get there. The summary doc provides several examples of approaches to help returning dropouts get a foot in the door in postsecondary programs.
  

According to the presentation, in the first two cycles of the pilot, more than twice the # of students as proposed in the funded target (4,141 vs. 2,042) enrolled in the program, and of those, nearly 1 in 3 (1,286) had completed the program with a high school diploma or college readiness, and 33% (1,370) were still enrolled in the program.

The hallmarks of this program should be considered by other states as they seek to improve their dropout prevention/recovery offerings.