One large Broadway theater.
At roughly 1,500 seats, that’s about how many high school dropouts Tulsa needs to convert to high school graduates to do its part in helping the nation increase its graduation rate to 90 percent by 2020.
That was the visual cue offered Tuesday in Tulsa at the national summer conference of Diplomas Now by Robert Balfanz, a research scientist from Johns Hopkins University School of Education.
“We are just now getting our first graduates,” Balfanz said to a packed banquet room at the Hyatt Regency hotel downtown.
“How many kids that were really off track when you got them in sixth grade were really on track by the time they graduated middle school and went on to high school?” he asked. “This is really hard work and it doesn’t always work, so it’s really important to reflect on the success stories, because that’s what keeps us going.”
Over the past two years, Diplomas Now has helped 73 percent of seventh- through 12th-graders at Clinton Middle School and Webster High School stay on track for graduation.
Read the full article at the Tulsa World, here.
/talentdevelopmentsecondary
/TDSchools
/talent-development-secondary