PHILADELPHIA—Like many young Americans, Julia Capece went straight from high school to college. Halfway toward her bachelor’s degree, however, Capece decided to move out of her parents’ home. She tried juggling work and school but living on her own and keeping up with tuition and coursework proved too much. Capece finally gave up and dropped [...]

A growing network of online classes is giving thousands of high school students a second or third chance to pass courses they need to graduate, from algebra and history to health and physical education. The classes are part of a widening phenomenon called credit recovery — a term that sounds more about erasing debt than [...]

Brett Rusnock can follow his students’ every move on his laptop: how much time they spend on computers each day at Houston’s Waltrip High School, their scores on quizzes, how much of a class they’ve completed — and when they stop working altogether. He even gets email alerts when they toil at home into the [...]

Since he dropped out of high school at 17, Frederick Dixson has wanted to continue his education. Intermittently homeless, unemployed and locked up, he’s struggled in a variety of programs for dropouts. Now 22, Dixson thinks he’s finally found a way to graduate. The only catch is that too many other dropouts are thinking the [...]

In high schools all over the country this summer, thousands of students who failed high school courses are getting a second chance. They are taking advantage of a wide variety of programs under the label of “credit recovery” that are meant to boost students’ chances of graduating. The classes are generally shorter than the original [...]

This story was part of a special section of the July-August, 2010 edition of the Washington Monthly magazine that was guest edited by Richard Lee Colvin, editor of The Hechinger Report. In his first address to Congress in February 2009, when the nation teetered on the brink of economic collapse, President Obama declared that “dropping [...]

Last fall, the New York City public schools granted Justin Skeete, a twenty-year-old dropout from a crime-ridden section of Coney Island, a third and last chance to graduate from high school.

Between 2001 and 2009 the percentage of Philadelphia students who entered ninth grade and graduated in four years increased from 48 percent to 56 percent. Those gains might seem modest, and are clearly insufficient. But the fact that they occurred at all, and at a time when dropout rates nationally have not budged, suggests that Philadelphia is doing something right.

In a school district that enrolls 47,000 students, only 43 percent are poor (in Chicago, 85 percent are) and a majority are white (in Philadelphia, 13 percent are). White and middle-class teens are far less likely to drop out of high school than their minority and low-income peers. But a shockingly low percentage of Portland’s high school students graduate on time: just 53 percent.

This story was part of a special section of the July-August, 2010 edition of the Washington Monthly magazine that was guest edited by Richard Lee Colvin, editor of The Hechinger Report. Jayquan Hyman, a gangly fifteen-year-old ninth grader, seemed destined to drop out after starting high school last September. He failed fifth grade and was [...]

President Obama and the U.S. Congress could raise the public high school graduation rate to 100 percent by fiat. All they’d need do is require that, as a condition for receiving federal aid, school districts had to give diplomas to all eighteen-year-olds, regardless of whether they had shown up for classes or learned anything. Conversely, in a quest for higher standards, policymakers could make graduating from high school so difficult that only future Nobel Prize winners would ever walk across the stage, capped and gowned.

Breaking up big, dysfunctional high schools into smaller units looked like a reform that failed. Look again.