The U.S. Department of Education’s Education Innovation and Research program awarded two independent five-year, $5 million grants to Johns Hopkins researchers. The first will develop an early-warning system and school connectedness interventions in Baltimore middle schools. The second will implement a school connectedness pilot in Indiana middle and high schools.
Two separate teams from the Center for Social Organization of Schools (CSOS) at the Johns Hopkins School of Education have earned independent five-year, $5 million grants to implement novel early-warning systems and school connectedness interventions at middle and high schools in Baltimore and across the state of Indiana, the U.S. Department of Education has announced.
A universal tool
The first grant, overseen by principal investigator Marcia Davis, co-director of CSOS and director of research at the Baltimore Education Research Consortium, will develop a system to identify at-risk students in Baltimore middle schools and target them with interventions to help them and their families feel more connected to their school communities. Among many research vectors, Davis studies the value of school connectedness in helping to keep such at-risk students in school and on track for graduation.
Davis and team at CSOS will implement a first-of-its-kind early-warning system to bring to educators’ attention students most at risk of dropping out, but also who would stand to benefit from the sort of high-touch, personal approaches on which school connectedness programs are predicated. At-risk students will be identified by an array of data points, including attendance, grade point average, and other factors. Davis and team will then develop interventions for educators, counselors, and administrators to work with identified students individually to feel more connected to their school communities.
“School connectedness is as close as we have to a universal tool for preventing a wide range of challenges adolescents face that may harm their academic success, educational attainment, and overall well-being,” Davis explains. Her team’s work will focus on the ninth-grade year, when students are just beginning high school and there is more time to get them back on track to graduate.
“Ninth grade is kind of a make-or-break year. So we want to have a really good foundation—good habits, good skills—going into ninth grade,” Davis says. “A lot of this work is focused on middle school because that’s where we can make the most difference.”
As a product of Baltimore City Public Schools, Davis sees the work as a homecoming of sorts—in working with the school system that inspired her career. “To me, it’s rewarding to see immediate impact and know that the work I’m doing is making a difference for students in my hometown,” she said.
Breaking the cycle
The second grant, overseen by principal investigator Robert Balfanz, co-director of CSOS, will help school administrators across the state of Indiana to develop, pilot, field test, and examine the impact of school and classroom interventions and materials aimed at increasing students’ school connectedness in the state’s middle and high schools.
Following the COVID-19 pandemic, Balfanz notes, America’s schools have seen dramatic increases in “chronic absenteeism,” in which students miss 10% or more of the school year. Chronic absenteeism is shown to affect not just the students who miss class but regularly attending students as well. Educators find themselves playing catch-up with the chronically absent students, depriving the rest of the class of educational opportunities.
“American schools face historically high levels of absenteeism and student disengagement, and it is critical that schools have effective, evidence-based, and implementable means to address these key issues,” Balfanz says of the driving force behind both grants. “Under this grant, the Center for the Social Organization of Schools will demonstrate that improvement in school connectedness can and does lead to gains in student engagement and reductions in chronic absenteeism.”
Efforts under both grants to increase school connectedness include initiatives to build supportive relationships with adults in the schools. In this regard, it’s important that students feel that their schools care about them and their academic success, Davis says. Likewise, evidence shows that feeling part of a positive peer group and meaningfully engaging in pro-social learning activities is also critical, Balfanz adds.
The recommendations draw from two key studies—“The Wingspread Declaration: A National Strategy for Improving School Connectedness” and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s “School Connectedness: Strategies for Increasing Protective Factors Among Youth”—along with a growing mountain of scientific evidence detailing the intersections of school connectedness, student well-being, and academic success.
“The bottom line is that students who feel connected to their schools are more likely to succeed,” Balfanz concludes. “Both of these grants are aimed at ensuring that every student, regardless of prior school success, feels they are a part of their own educational community and engaged in their own education.”
Johns Hopkins is the only university to earn two awards in this year’s slate of highly competitive grants from the U.S. Department of Education’s Education Innovation and Research program, established to inspire, fund, and implement “entrepreneurial, evidence-based, field-initiated innovations” that boost high-need students’ performance and success in school.
