The team leader for the AmeriCorps success coaches, the integrated student support site coordinator, and instructional coaches, all join grade-level teacher teams in participating in regular student success team meetings, where attendance, behavior, and course performance data is regularly analyzed to identify additional students with early warning indicators in need of support, to select or develop effective responses or interventions, and then progress monitor students who are being supported, to make sure the assigned action is working, and if it is not, trying an alternative approach, until something works. 

 

To validate the Diplomas Now model, the three organizations who originally created it – the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University and its Talent Development Secondary program, City Year, and Communities in School – sought private and public funding to engage in both a rapid research and development efforts and a large-scale randomized field trial.  

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Diplomas Now was supported by key funding from the Investing in Innovation (i3) grant program, with a Validation grant of $30,000,000 in 2010 and a $5,000,000 extension grant in 2014. 

An initial $11 million in grant funding from the PepsiCo Foundation combined with substantial federal funding allowed Diplomas Now to implement its programming in more schools and undergo a rigorous evaluation of its effectiveness. The 2014 extension grant enabled follow-up studies with students, including middle schoolers who moved on to high school and high schoolers who graduated. The Diplomas Now model’s refinement and validation was also supported by additional private funders like the Schusterman Foundation and the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation. 

 

The initial i3 funding enabled the MDRC evaluation, “Addressing Early Warning Indicators,” which examined 62 schools – 33 middle schools and 29 high schools – from 11 large urban school districts across the country. Schools were recruited to participate in the study starting in either the 2011-2012 or the 2012-2013 school year, and 32 schools were randomly assigned to incorporate Diplomas Now programming while 30 schools were randomly assigned to continue school programming as usual. 

 

The study revealed that Diplomas Now model had a positive and statistically significant impact on increasing the number of sixth and ninth graders who did not display early warning indicators for dropping out of high school – meaning they had at least 85 percent attendance rates, had not been suspended or expelled for more than three days, and had passing grades in English and math. Fewer 6th graders were chronically absent. Students at Diplomas Now schools also reported participating in more academically focused after-school activities, and more reported having a positive relationship with an adult at school who was not a teacher than did their peers in the comparison schools. 

 

The use of early warning and tiered intervention systems, which are at the heart of the Diplomas Now Model, has earned attention for its significant impact on graduation rates and is credited for playing a key role in the large increase in graduation rates in Alabama and West Virginia over the last decade. Between 2010 and 2019, Alabama raised its four-year graduation rate from 40th in the nation to first. West Virginia, meanwhile, jumped from 27th to third. 

 

Several coalitions are working to scale the key concepts from the Diplomas Now model to address some of the biggest problems in education, including chronic absenteeism and low graduation rates. The National Partnership for Student Success was created by the Johns Hopkins Everyone Graduates Center, Americorps, and the Department of Education in July 2022. It seeks to meet the President’s challenge of bringing 250,000 additional adults into schools to serve as mentors, tutors, success coaches, and integrated student support coordinator to address the academic, social-emotional, and well-being impacts of the pandemic on the nation’s schoolchildren. The coalition now has more than 200 member organizations. 

 

The GRAD Partnership is working to scale the next generation of early warning systems, designed for post-pandemic times, called student success systems. It includes organizations like BARR, the American Institutes for Research, the Network for College Success, the Carnegie Endowment for Teaching and Learning, and the Everyone Graduates Center. 

 

The Cross-State, High School Redesign Collaborative, which includes networks of redesigning high schools in Mississippi, Ohio, New York, and Alabama, is integrating early warning systems and people-powered student supports, into whole school improvement efforts to create localized versions of the Diplomas Now model. All of these current efforts are working to bring the key components of the Diplomas Now model to scale. 

 

The federal investment in scaling and evaluating Diplomas Now highlighted effective solutions to persistent problems in public schools. It has shown that approaches such as early warning systems, tiered interventions, community partnerships, and integrated student supports can make a difference when used together. The federal investment to develop and validate the Diplomas Now framework continues to have meaningful ripple effects on school improvement efforts today.