Providing Students the Support they Need in Post-Pandemic Times

In the second episode of season three, Patricia Balana, Managing Director of the GRAD Partnership, joins Dr. Robert Balfanz to discuss how and why nine organizations came together to form the GRAD Partnership. The coalition is a national initiative that partners with communities to implement high-quality student success systems so that schools are better equipped to address the scale and scope of post-pandemic student needs and graduate all students ready for the future. The GRAD Partnership works directly with schools, districts, and local community organizations to create the conditions needed to bring the use of evidence-based student success systems from a new practice to common practice.

As part of the conversation, Patricia shares examples of their work to develop and spread student success systems. She also discusses the initial results of the GRAD Partnership’s efforts and how student success systems are reducing chronic absenteeism rates and course failures.

Transcript

robert balfanz (00:16.656)

Hello and welcome to season three of the Designing Education Podcast. In today's episode, we'll be talking to Patricia Balana, managing director of the Grad Partnership. We can't wait to jump into the conversation. But before we start, we want to take a moment to remind you to subscribe to the Designing Education Podcast, wherever you listen to your podcasts. We're available on Spotify, Apple, and Google Podcasts, just to name a few. Subscribe to the Designing Education Podcast, and never miss an episode.

robert balfanz (01:25.532)

Welcome to the Designing Education podcast series. I'm Dr. Robert Balfanz, director of the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University. In this episode, we're going to engage in a conversation with Patricia Balana, managing director of the Grad Partnership. It is the second episode of our third season of conversations we are having with education leaders, thinkers, and practitioners from across the country about what it will take to create an education system that truly empowers all young people and sets them on a pathway to long-term success. 

This season, we are doing a deep dive on student success systems. And today we're learning how and why nine organizations came together to form the Grad Partnership and how it is working to develop and spread student success systems. We will also hear about some of the initial results of their efforts and how student success systems are reducing course failure and chronic absenteeism rates.

robert balfanz (02:22.792)

This is very timely. As post-pandemic, there has been a tsunami-like wave of chronic absenteeism across the country, with rates doubling or more in most communities. Chronic absenteeism has increased everywhere and reached unprecedented levels in historically underserved communities. Chronic absenteeism, in turn, is a major driver of course failure, particularly among middle and high school students, which in turn increases the risk of dropping out of school or graduating high school not fully prepared for post-secondary success. Student success systems are designed by the Grad Partnership based on the insights of hundreds of educators to enable schools and communities to provide students the level and intensity of supports they need to succeed in post-pandemic times. That is why we are so excited to have Patricia with us today so we can learn more about them.

robert balfanz (11:26.6)

Welcome, Patricia. It's wonderful to have you here today.

patricia balana (11:31.697)

Thank you for having me.

robert balfanz (11:33.416)

We start all our podcasts by asking our guests the same question. When you were in high school, what was a good day?

patricia balana (11:43.189)

Well, I'm actually from Northern Ireland, so it was secondary school for me, really equivalent to high school in the US. I was actually part of the grammar school sector, a selective education system in Northern Ireland, much cherished, also much debated to this day. So, despite my grammar school track, I won't think it's fair to say I was fairly average at most things. So good days for me were when I had a trusted teacher or two who knew where my strengths were - very important in the highly competitive school setting, be able to participate in team sports, preferably those that I could choose. And maybe thirdly, just having a solid group of friends. And that's about it.

robert balfanz (12:32.136)

Yeah, that's wonderful. We're going to get into a little bit later, but it seems to me that a way to sum it up is that you felt a good day is when you felt a sense of connectedness to adults, to students, to important activities. So, let's dive into it. Tell us a little bit about the Grad partnership, what it is and what it's trying to achieve.

patricia balana (12:40.189)

That's right.

patricia balana (12:51.781)

Sure, happy to. So, the Grad Partnership is a collective of nine organizations working together to help ensure that schools are equipped to graduate students prepared for college and their careers. As we emerged from the pandemic, as you've already mentioned Bob, we knew there was an urgent need to address record high rates of chronic absenteeism and get students back on track to graduate.

Our nine organizations have decades of experience helping schools develop and refine these approaches that keep students on track to graduate. And the grad partnership was established or born from the belief that if we work together, we can have more impact than just by continuing to work alone. So, we committed to leveraging all of our individual strengths to ensure that the right supports were in place to meet the challenges of a post pandemic era. 

We call these next generation of support student success systems, and I'm sure we'll talk a little bit later in this conversation about that. But they really build on pre pandemic systems like early warning, on track, PBIS, MTSS. And our goal is to work with schools, with districts, community organizations, and a whole range of partners to foster their adoption and implementation in schools across the country.

robert balfanz (14:24.04)

That's wonderful. Sounds very exciting. And as you said, the idea is that these organizations could do more together than apart. But it's nine organizations, not two or three or four or five. How do you keep nine organizations moving together towards a common goal?

patricia balana (14:36.29)

Yes.

patricia balana (14:43.477)

Sure, so nine organizations are a lot. And creating the conditions for that collaborative effort amongst a large group of partners, it's purposeful work, it is time intensive work, but it's worthwhile work. When I think about how I organize, I suppose there are a couple of things that are really helpful.

Firstly, the leaders of these organizations are a group of mission-driven leaders, very experienced practitioners, that have been doing this work for a very long time. And secondly, they've come together around this one common goal. And I think these two things provide, in my experience, a fairly stable basis for managing and organizing the partnership. When I think about my work and my role, I also think that so much of it is relational. Constant, open, honest communication is important and that can build trust and solid teamwork very quickly. I think another important thing is we also established very early in our time together an agreed process for making decisions and that has been very helpful in how we've been able to move the work forward. 

In terms of how we've organized, in terms of our structure, we've organized ourselves around four big drivers of scale and sustainability. These drivers are the critical avenues through which we're aiming to bring student success systems from a new to a normal practice, which is our sort of collective goal. We have folks from each of these nine organizations on the drivers, so they're each cross-organizational teams.

And then we have a central core or hub that provides the backbone support. And then maybe just the last thing I would say which is important: We know what we are trying to measure as a collective but having that shared understanding of what we are trying to do together, what impact we will have and be able to measure that is just a really important piece in terms of how we are organized as well.  

robert balfanz (08:57.288)

Thank you, thank you. That was a very rich answer. Can you just say a little more about what those four drivers of work are, that the partners are organized together to do?

patricia balana (17:11.617)

Sure, so the four drivers you may have to help me out here and remember, but the four drivers are the first one is sort of building awareness and advocacy. The second one is resourcing the field that is developing tools and resources that support our educators and our teachers and leaders. The third is really about scaling student success systems and then the fourth, I'm not sure I've got the title right, but the focus is really on sustainability.

robert balfanz (17:40.34)

Thank you. That extra detail is just helpful. So, as you noted that many of the grad partnership partners were the actual creators of early warning systems, on track systems, early warning and intervention systems, and have worked for 15 or more years helping schools and districts implement them. What led them to collectively decide to call the next generation or post pandemic version of this work Student Success Systems?

patricia balana (18:11.729)

Yes, so it started with the pulling of the expertise of our partners who, after having spent as you say about 15 plus years in the field, were well positioned to identify places where our current systems could be improved. So, we all put our heads together and began working on, I suppose the key characteristics of a system that would meet the needs of our students.

Then, and this is key, we got feedback from the field. We solicited input from about 320 educators, teachers, counselors, school leaders, board members, community partners across the country about the kinds of challenges they were facing, the strategies and approaches they were using, and the ways those approaches were both succeeding but also falling short.

We heard loud and clear that a positive frame, student success, is what the field needs, not systems that focus on the negative. They also affirmed our focus on the importance of mindsets and supportive relationships, while making absolutely clear that no one needed more to do and making it absolutely clear that they didn't want another new thing.

What they needed was a system for helping align the various efforts already underway. Schools often have, as you know Bob, multiple teams in place, all working separately towards very similar goals. So collectively, we came up with the name Student Success Systems. They can be defined as a way of better organizing that whole school community to be able to meet the needs of individual students and coordinate proactive efforts that support the entire school.

robert balfanz (20:12.288)

Thanks, thanks, that's very, very helpful and again, very rich. But let's go a little deeper. Can you just tell us what are some of the key components of a student success system? If I were to say, what's in the mix there? What makes this whole? What are its pieces?

patricia balana (20:29.097)

Yes, so there are four pieces in the mix, four components of a student success system, key predictive indicators, tiered responses, focus on strong supportive relationships and student-centered mindsets. For time's sake I'll maybe just say a little bit about a couple of them. 

Relationships, so relationships are at the heart of everything, no surprise to anyone listening. They drive trust.  They're essential to work collaboratively to support our students. High-quality student success systems really build and strengthen relationships. And it's not just those between our students and teachers, which is, of course, a very crucial and core one. But relationships between educators also matter. Teachers and their leaders need to work together. So that's a really important element as well. Relationships between families and schools are another one. When teachers and school leaders have a mutually supportive, trusting relationships with parents and caregivers, you've got a whole team working together to support a student. You've got to have the parents or caregivers’ input and support. They have so much information that the school doesn't have that really helps create this more informed and holistic picture of the student.

And of course we can't forget the relationships between the students themselves. Peers can be a great support for each other and when students have a strong peer group at school, and I can attest to this, they are more likely to feel connected to the school, which helps them want to come to school.

robert balfanz (22:14.728)

Yeah, so that's so critical, this idea of relationships all around. And it's one of those things we sometimes tend to skip over, because we just think, oh, they'll just naturally form. But as we know, and as you know, and as those educators told us, and as we know, working with schools, that's actually not the case. And we don't even know from national data that, especially by the time they get to high school, often half or more kids will say, no adult really knows me.

robert balfanz (22:44.2)

You know, and that's not a good thing.

patricia balana (22:44.495)

That's right.

patricia balana (22:50.469)

That's not a good thing. Maybe I'll just say just a couple of sentences about another component of our student success system, student-centered mindsets. So, mindsets are the why. They are the foundation of a shared understanding about why student success systems are needed and why the whole - the school community values them. They help make sure everyone is working together and for the same reasons which is not to say they're easy at all. Developing shared mindsets takes work, takes intentional dialogue, reflection, and shared experience. High-quality student success systems thrive when all students in the building share that common set of attitudes and belief that respect the whole young person. So, a big part of developing and improving student success systems is working to create that - that mindset that centers students in every aspect of the work.

robert balfanz (23:50.908)

Yeah, I mean, I remember that when I saw some of the data that you talked about from the teachers and they were sort of saying that, you know, if we don't agree on the why, this won't last that long.

patricia balana (23:59.697)

That's right. That's right. It's always a quote I remember.

robert balfanz (24:06.26)

So that really helped to sort of define a little bit more what the actual work is, this idea of building relationships and supportive mindsets, but then sort of the other work of using predictive indicators to progress monitor all kids, to see who might need extra help or support when, and then figuring out what's the best way to do that, right? That's the complete system you talked about. But let's try to make that a little less abstract.

Can you share with us one or two examples of how a school uses student success systems to achieve better outcomes or learning environments for its students?

patricia balana (24:43.553)

Yes, I would love to do that, and we have so, so many examples. So, what we've tried to do over the last year is really try and uplift our best examples through our Spotlight series, which highlights schools and districts who are implementing some of the components of student success that we've just talked about. I'll share one of those from our Spotlight series. 

Southeast Lauderdale is a great example because they show how getting students more engaged in extracurricular is actually a really good approach to increase attendance and improve course performance. So, this is a school in rural Mississippi, Southeast Lauderdale serving a wide geography of I believe nearly 400 or so students. They were faced with a wave of chronic absenteeism like all of our schools across the country, but they made a concerted effort to focus on this idea of school connectedness. And we know that regular class attendance is a key factor in course performance. When students don't feel connected to school, as we've already said, they're less likely to show up. So last year, the school decided to make a focused, very intentional effort to connect more students to school. They started with a with a very basic but helpful survey, like a social and emotional survey of all their students, to get a better sense of their struggles, how they truly feel about school, how they feel about themselves, and life in general. And they combined this survey insights with teacher knowledge, recognizing a wide spread leg of school connection and took intentional steps to connect all students to a school activity. 

And they started with a simple Google spreadsheet listing all their high school students and they had all the school staff weigh in on which students were connected to which activities from football to cheerleading clubs to CTE clubs anything that the school offered, and it was interesting they found that 40 percent of their students were not involved in any activities beyond the required mandatory courses. 

They then set out to find a place for each of those folks, those young folks at school, focusing on students identified as unconnected. They even created new teams and activities for students with different interests. After all this work, almost 90% of the school students are now connected to a school extracurricular activity, which is really great. That's just one of our spotlight stories, and I would encourage our listeners just to check our website.

patricia balana (27:28.765)

Many good stories there from some of our other spotlight schools, but that's just a particularly encouraging example.

robert balfanz (27:36.432)

And I've read that spotlight series, so I know that because of that, both their attendance and their course performance went up as well. The kids were more connected, they came more often, they came more often, they did better. Thanks, that's a great example. And it's sort of highlighted one of the unique things about the Grad Partnership, in that it's not just working with, as many things in the end tend to do, sort of big urban districts.

patricia balana (27:43.601)

That's correct.

robert balfanz (28:01.788)

but it's also working with rural schools and grassroots organizations to spread student success systems. Could you just tell us a little bit more about that?

patricia balana (28:12.141)

Yes, so I'll start first with our rural schools. So, the work has really taken off very fast in rural communities. At the outset of the project, we had two separate cohorts of 10 or 11 rural schools supported by an intermediary which was identified through one of our core partners, Rural Schools Collaboratives, existing regional hubs in two areas far Northern California and the Alabama Mississippi Black Belt. With the support of a dedicated project facilitator, these cohorts were able to rapidly implement some of the components of student success systems. And these served as really good examples for other geographical areas. The rural team supported by our TA partners, they've also been very effective in storytelling and attracting regional and national attention. 

As we know, our rural friends, our rural schools, often have feelings of isolation. And being able to share their successes and challenges across schools and districts really helped address some of those feelings of isolation. And another sort of result of the pandemic was the many shifts and district and school leadership and the new rural multi-district network also meant that the work was more resilient to shifts in leadership and new leaders could be supported by their nearby peers. So, our learnings and our progress within the two existing, or the two first cohorts, has really helped us to develop a model for a national cohort of rural intermediaries that would help build on the early momentum to create a movement of rural adoption, which is very exciting for sure. 

You also mentioned about grassroots organizations. So, another of our key advocacy partners is the Schott Foundation. They have connected us with multiple grassroots organizations, mainly within their OTL, their Opportunity to Learn Network.

And each of these organizations are working hard to lift up student success systems within their networks and are really helping us to, really giving us advice as we continue to refine our approach to student success system implementation. It would also just be remiss if I could just mention our third really important advocacy partner, National Center for Learning Disabilities, NCLD, who along with Shott and Rural Schools Collaborative have had an outsized impact on our early success in raising awareness and building relationships and really importantly connecting us with our constituents.

robert balfanz (31:20.348)

Yeah, what I was going to say, one key thing that unites the work with all those groups and organizations is that really this idea of building tight connections with the communities in which the work is done. So, it's not, we're not just bringing in some outside ideas that say, these are evidence based so just do them. But we're really working with them to say, how can these ideas be adapted and customized and best work where you are. And asking you to be the ones that do that work and be the lead in implementing and making the, as we all sometimes say, the best student success system is going to be the one that you create and adapt for your community.

robert balfanz (32:04.508)

So that this all sounds wonderful, but the proof is in the pudding. Can you share with us what some of the initial results from the Grad Partnership’s work have been?

patricia balana (32:15.197)

Yes, so the data we have so far on outcomes is really encouraging and we're all very happy about that, especially considering what our schools and our educators and our students were up against. We started working with our first batch of schools in the year following what many teachers and school leaders have referenced as the most challenging year of their careers. This was the 21-22 school year when the pandemic was still causing massive disruptions, student quarantines, class cancellations and all that confusion and stress. As schools settled more into a routine in year 22-23, the full impact of all of that, students' mental and social, emotional, and academic well-being became much more apparent. Chronic absenteeism spiked an all-time high, behavior challenges consumed educator attention, all while schools confronted what we already mentioned, staff shortages and leadership turnover. But, our initial outcome data for the schools that we started working with in 2022-23 suggests that student success systems were up to the challenge. We have pre and post-implementation data for most of our schools, looking at both course failures and chronic absenteeism rates. And we also ask our school coaches to fill out a survey that gave us a better sense of progress on different aspects of student success system implementation at the schools they were working with. 

So. we ask our coaches questions about the formation of student success teams. So. these are the groups of adults who really do the work, meet regularly to review the data, share insights, develop approaches and strategies and track how well these strategies are working. Over two-thirds of the implementing schools achieve substantial establishment of student success teams during their first year of implementation.

That is no easy feat because it often involves realigning existing teams, getting staff buy-in, and committing to regular meetings. And without the Student Success Teams established, the work remains abstract and inconsistent. The data also shows that the teams largely did what they set out to do. Nearly all the teams not only analyzed predictive indicator data,  they went further and combined those indicator data with their own knowledge and insights about students. About half the teams went even further than that, tapping team members with existing strong relationships with particular students to talk directly with them to better understand their challenges. Approaches like these really created a whole or a holistic picture of the student, and that's really key for taking actions and developing supports. 

In terms of course failures and chronic absenteeism, so I'll take course failure rates first. After one year, three quarters of our implementing grade levels showed enhanced course pass rates. About 41 schools, across 41 schools, the proportion of students failing one or more course decreased by an average of five percentage points dropping from 25.5% in 21-22 to 20.5% in 22-23. Among the 22 schools reporting course failure data for the ninth grade, the average decline in course failure rates was 9.2 percentage points. And the greatest impacts were reported for ninth grade cohorts that were assessed as solid levels of implementation in their first year. On average, these schools saw 14.4 percentage point decline in ninth graders failing one or more classes. So, a lot a lot of very encouraging results. 

Yes, and just on the chronic absenteeism front across all the reported schools and grades, chronic absenteeism and just for our listeners, that's when a student misses 10 days or more in a school year.

robert balfanz (36:55.784)

Very good results, very good results.

patricia balana (37:12.605)

5.4 percentage points during the initial implementation year. So nearly all implementing grades experiencing declines with 75% reporting decreases of at least two percentage points. A quarter achieved drops of eight percentage points or more. So, so much to celebrate for sure.

robert balfanz (37:34.056)

Absolutely, shows great promise. As does this whole effort. Thank you, Patricia. This has been a great conversation. Is there anything else you'd like to share or tell the audience about Grad Partnership and its work with student success systems? And is there a website for our listeners to visit?

patricia balana

Yes, so our website was launched last spring. We routinely add content including news highlights, emerging research on this topic of student success systems, we have blogs and posts written by our team, our advisory boards, our communicating partners, so please check that out. You can also find information on our website about our spotlight schools and our growing band of intermediary partners.

Many helpful resources there. Please also follow us on Twitter, now X @gradpartners. And I've enjoyed the conversation. Thank you so much for inviting me to talk about it today.

robert balfanz (39:06.496)

Great. And Patricia, am I right that the actual URL is www.gradpartnership.org  for the website?

patricia balana (39:14.237)

Yes, it is. I forgot to mention that you got it right, Bob. Thank you for that.

robert balfanz (39:19.304)

No worries, no worries. 

So in closing, our schools have not been designed to routinely provide all the support students need to succeed. Far too many continue to fall through the cracks. As we heard today, it does not have to be this way. We know how to do better. The evidence is clear. To succeed, students need to believe that adults in the school care about them as a person and that they have a supportive peer group. They need to be engaged in activities they find meaningful and they need to feel welcome in school for who they are. 

Schools can and are being designed to enable this. We also know that to be useful, data on student success needs to be actionable and holistic and that we need to be strategic in finding the highest leverage point to effectively respond to the data. To do this, we need to engage students, caregivers, and the community as equal partners in identifying challenges and the solutions to them and then work continuously to improve our efforts. 

For this to work, wide agreement on the why of what we are doing and who we are doing it for has to be broadly shared. These are the core elements of a student success system. And as we've heard today, all are within the capacity of our schools to implement. This is why we're looking forward to seeing what the grad partnership learns about what it will take to move their use from a new practice to a routine everyday normal school activity that keeps all students on a pathway to adult success.

robert balfanz (40:51.748)

As we close, we want to ask you to please subscribe to the Designing Education Podcast to stay up to date on all the revolutionary work happening in education. If you're enjoying the show, leave us a five-star review. Also, please share the show with a friend or colleague on social media. This has been Robert Balfanz from the Everyone Graduates Center, thanking everyone for listening and inviting you to listen to the other episodes in our Designing Education series wherever you listen to your podcasts. Onward and be well.