Opinion
Assets for Keeping Young People in School
June 29, 2015
Today, the Center for Promise – the research institute of America’s Promise Alliance, housed at Boston University’s School of Education – released a new brief, The Building Blocks of a GradNation: Assets for Keeping Young People in School.
Much has been written about what causes students to leave high school before graduating. Adverse life experiences – like homelessness, parental incarceration, repeat suspensions, being a teen parent, taking drugs – have been found time and again to predict leaving school.
What is less discussed is the set of factors in a young person’s life that promote graduation from high school, what our colleagues at the Search Institute call “developmental assets.”
Taking a Positive Youth Development approach (which recognizes the assets of youth and their communities) and leveraging our learnings from Don’t Call Them Dropouts, we reviewed literature from the past 25 years to understand if certain assets in a young person’s life can promote graduation or, at least, continued enrollment in school. We found evidence for 10 assets that met our stringent criteria (click here to read more about our methodology).
The 10 assets that emerged through our analysis include:
Individual Assets
- Expectations for academic attainment or achievement
- Intrinsic academic motivation or personal desire to achieve
- School engagement
- Internal locus of control – a sense of control over ones’ future
Family Assets
- Parent academic involvement
- Parent-adolescent connection
Peer Assets
- Peer academic norms or how peers achieve academically
School Assets
- Positive student-teacher relationships
- Extra-curricular activities
Community Assets
- Out-of-school time programs
These findings suggest there are upstream levers that policy and practice can pull to potentially impact the downstream outcome of educational attainment. That is, we can make interventions that directly effect a young person’s likelihood of staying in school and graduating.
When considering the best use of limited dollars, we should consider investing in programs that include and maximize these 10 assets.
When considering the best use of limited dollars, we should consider investing in programs that include and maximize these 10 assets. We see examples of such initiatives in school-based and afterschool programs, particularly those that have focused on building the social and emotional learning competencies of youth. The benefits of such programs have been shown to outstrip costs. Although more research on existing programs and development of new programs that focus on these assets will further inform policymakers and practitioners, the findings from our study provide guidance on the elements within programs that deserve more attention and investment.
The GradNation Action Platform
These six platform areas are based on the collective experience and expertise of individuals at organizations engaged with young people across the country, the experience of young people themselves, and our own research. The platform areas are a statement of best practice – they are what has been demonstrated to work to improve graduation outcomes for young people:
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