2006 Grantees
Learning to Finish: Solution that Leads to Graduation
Suzanne W. Morse, President, Pew Partnership for Civic ChangeCharlottesville, Va.
CONTACT INFO
Suzanne Morse
Learning to Finish
Pew Partnership for Civic Change
1927 Thomson Road
Charlottesville, VA 22903
(434) 981-7845
E-mail
Website
The partnership will launch and maintain a wiki dedicated to sharing information and ideas for countering the nationwide high school drop-out crisis. Currently one-third of U.S. high school seniors, or about 500,000 students, don’t graduate on time. Initial content will come from the Pew Partnership then from civic and religious groups, parents, teachers, citizens and policy makers solicited to join a dialogue about reversing the drop-out rate.
Check back for future news and updates.
• End of Year Two: October 2008
• End of Year One: November 2007
• Spring 2007
• November 2006
• August 2006
• Pew Partnership press release, PNNOnline article on launch
Crossing the Finish Line to Graduation
End of Year Two: October 2008
In April, 2008, Suzanne Morse of the Pew Partnership for Civil Change had a meeting with Dr. Rita Bishop, the new superintendent of Roanoke City Schools. Dr. Bishop didn’t know that Morse was the mover behind the Learning to Finish Wiki and the Finish Line Calculator. But in that meeting, the woman charged with improving educational outcomes in Roanoke showed Morse a printout from the calculator as proof that Roanoke had work to do: The calculator revealed that based on data from 2004 and 2005, only 51% of 9th grade students are likely to finish high school. The numbers in Roanoke are bleak, but knowing her calculator was becoming a go-to place to good data was a triumph for Morse.
In fact it was the Finish Link Calculator introduced in the Fall of 2007 that put the Learning to Finish wiki on the map. The Calculator is a tool that allows users to quantify high school dropout trends and see projected graduation rates for individual school districts, states, and the United States as a whole. Up until they introduced this data-rich, somewhat addictive, searchable, sortable tool, the wiki itself hadn’t attracted the level of buy-in and participation from the nonprofit, civic and education worlds as hoped. The calculator changed that equation.
In the past year, Morse reports the site has received over 500, 000 hits. The calculator caught viral buzz from The National League of Cities and its 40,000 members; blogs such as The College Puzzle; national organizations such as the National Center for Deliberative Democracy, business groups such as the Oklahoma State Chamber of Commerce and policy group such as The Bell Policy Center and Education Commission of the States. “This issue and this medium reached far into our communities through a variety of sources,” said Morse.
The Pew Partnership provided funding to place Google ads linking users to the site. Morse says this effort was only moderately successful, but it helped boost traffic based on searches of key words like “dropout” and “high school completion.”
Ahead on the horizon: The Superintendent of Public Instruction for the Commonwealth of Virginia is considering incorporating the wiki into a new dropout prevention initiative. And Morse plans to update the content and links on the wiki and seek additional funding to update the calculator with 2006 data.
Learning to Finish Launches Graduation Rate Calculator
End of Year One: November 2007
At the start of 2007 school year, Learning to Finish launched a new web tool that gives communities the opportunity to compare the graduation rate in their school district with their state average. Visitors to the site can select their state and school district from drop down menus and the Finish Line Calculator will produce a simple visual accounting of the percentage of ninth graders expected to graduate on time.
For a project that seeks to network solutions about solving the nation’s high school drop-out crisis, the calculator turned out to be an effective way to communicate the scope of the problem.
“Graduation rate statistics are used widely, but they are often misleading or not properly presented, said Dr. Suzanne Morse, president of the Pew Partnership for Civic Change, the project’s sponsor. “We hope the Finish Line Calculator gives communities a number they can use to start a discussion and the information they need to keep the conversation going.”
The Finish Line Calculator also offers articles detailing the challenges of calculating graduation and dropout rates, as well as the mathematical equations used to determine these results.
According to Morse, visits to the Learning to Finish wiki have increased steadily, reaching 20,000 hits per month in the spring. “Our biggest challenge continues to be increasing contributions from visitors.” Site producers have written and posted 50 encyclopedia length articles on different aspects of the dropout problem. “Ultimately, our goal is for users to contribute the majority of the content, but we believe the best way to attract in interest is to provide relevant, cutting-edge information as the primer,” says Morse.
They plan to promote the wiki to educational groups and organizations that have proven strategies for encouraging student retention.
The wiki also recently added a counter to the top of its welcome page that estimates the number of school dropouts so far this year. The page reads: “Each year over 3.5 million American students drop out of school. It’s an ongoing crisis that translates into approximately one lost student every 9 seconds.”
Drop-out Wiki Tries to Entice More Interaction
Spring 2007
Just what percentage of students drop out of high school before they graduate in each state? And just what is a state’s “graduation rate”? And just how are these percentages calculated?
There are several ways to come up with these numbers, as the Learning to Finish Wiki explains. This initiative by the Pew Partnership for Civic Change offers background readings, simple explainers and 28 case studies on the subject of understanding why young people drop out of school and how they might be encouraged to stay through graduation.
The Partnership has seeded the wiki with rich content in hopes that it would encourage visitors to contribute their own material. “Visitors have contributed to articles on ‘Problems Facing Dropouts,’ ‘What Dropouts Say About Dropping Out’ and ‘Background Information,’ said Suzanne Morse, president of Pew Partnership, but the project would like to see more contributions and interaction.
To increase participation, the staff has sent e-mails to 40 different education groups inviting their members to participate on the wiki website. A member of the Amarillo School Board has agreed to write a few wiki articles for the site. Additionally, they sent letters to 50 groups with best practices in dropout prevention.
The project has also redesigned the wiki’s front page and re-written the wiki instructions, “to look more appealing to new users.” They also have reorganized the article display format to make it easier to find and contribute to articles of interest.
Plans are in the works to develop a dropout calculator on the website to promote interaction. “We’re going to create a drop-out calculator to juice participation,” Tim Emmert said at a meeting of New Voices grantees in March 2007. “Let them calculate it and then when we shock them, get them to do something about it.”
Forty Wiki Articles, Discussion Guide Focus on Dropouts
November 2006
Since launching the Learning to Finish Wiki at the National Press Club on October 25, the Pew Partnership for Civic Change has concentrated on promoting the site and attracting users and contributors.
With more than 40 articles on issues related to the school dropout problem in the U.S., the wiki provides plenty of original content, mostly written by Partnership staffers. Some users have added their thoughts to these articles. The wiki garnered 74,000 hits from late October to early January, and 1,000 individual visitors, says Suzanne Morse, president of the Partnership. To encourage more participation in the broader Learning to Finish campaign, the Partnership published a community discussion guide titled “The School Dropout Crisis: Why One-Third of All High School Students Don’t Graduate and What Your Community Can Do About It” and distributed that to various community groups. The guide directs readers to the wiki. A Partnership newsletter, mailed the week of November 26 to foundation executives, researchers, policy experts and others, also touts the wiki.
The Partnership has applied for a Google Grant that would give prominent ad and link placement to the wiki on Google. Morse reports that the organization has linked the Learning to Finish Wiki to Wikipedia articles on dropouts to promote cross-traffic. Plus, staffers compiled lists of potential users, such as Parent Teacher Associations and education researchers who will be invited to use the site.
“The feedback on the wiki we have received at the press conference and in discussions with community leaders participating in the Learning to Finish Campaign has been positive,” Morse writes in her progress report on the project. Some have been leery of the new technology, she notes, but a tutorial should help explain how to use the wiki. “We hope that, in time, this porthole will become a significant mode of communication between community members, researchers, educators, parents concerned about the dropout problem.”
Learning to Finish Campaign Launches with Wiki
August 2006
The Learning to Finish project and wiki officially launched on Oct. 25 at a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. The wiki is one component of the Learning to Finish Campaign by the Pew Partnership for Civic Change. It hosts information on the high school drop-out problem and encourages the sharing of ideas to combat it.
The Learning to Finish Campaign is an effort to find new ways to curb high school dropout rates. One million students drop out of school each year, and it’s a problem communities have been wrestling with for years, says Pew Partnership President Suzanne Morse. The wiki will give them wide support. “We are convinced that one of the ways progress can be made is if leaders in schools, districts and municipalities across the country can find more efficient ways to share strategies [for helping students graduate] with each other and learn from the latest academic research,” Morse writes in her progress report on the project.
Visitors to the site can find information on student retention, including program case studies and background literature and reports.
In the months before the launch, Pew Partnership staffers were signing up communities to participate in the Learning to Finish Campaign and the wiki, and Jacksonville, Fla. and Shreveport, La., will be the pilot communities. In addition to serving as a discussion forum, the site will contain information about the wider campaign.
As part of the campaign, the partnership featured the wiki in its newsletter and published a book on drop-out issues that will point people to the site.
Morse reports that the partnership hired a designer and decided to use the simple, user-friendly DokuWiki software. For the wiki-shy, the site includes instructions and will have a “playground,” where users can test drive the wiki.
In early August, staffers began adding content and testing the site on an internal, private network. “One of the challenges of launching a new wiki is to provide enough initial content so that users will see the value of the site and contribute their own information,” Morse writes. To solve that problem, the partnership hired a research assistant to post and edit content, and another staff member has been assigned to do the same. Pew staffers will edit articles posted by the users.
“Now, there’s the real push to get people using it,” Morse says. The partnership will post information on initiatives in Shreveport and Jacksonville, the pilot communities for the campaign, and then really encourage folks to get on the site. “It’s a new technology, the name is strange to some people,” she says of the challenge of making sure people are aware of the wiki—and contribute to it.
Learning to Finish Campaign Launched
Release from Pew-Partnership.org.
Learning to Finish is a new campaign launched by the Pew Partnership for Civic Change in October 2006 that seeks to address the dropout problem in communities ready to meet this challenge as a community-wide concern.
Two cities, Shreveport, LA and Jacksonville, FL, have demonstrated civic interest in dropout and literacy initiatives in the past and will serve as our pilot communities. We will provide these communities with information, assistance, and the tools they need, as well as assistance in monitoring their progress.
We have developed the first dropout “wiki”; a “wiki” is a website that acts like an encyclopedia with one key difference - any registered user can make changes to the content. The Pew Partnership for Civic Change has already organized and posted content related to case studies, the latest research, and best practices. New users can register for free and begin posting relevant material at any time.
The Pew Partnership for Civic Change has also published a dropout discussion guide titled Learning to Finish: The School Dropout Crisis. Here the case is made for a community-wide approach to solving the dropout problem and the five elements that should serve as the core of any community-wide dropout effort.
Read the full release at Pew-Partnership.org.
• Read the article about Learning to Finish on PNNOnline: The Nonprofit News and Information Resource: “New Dropout Prevention Campaign Launched.”
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