Consulting Example: Reducing High School Truancy
Reducing High School Truancy
- Our client was the school district for a large city in the United States that had been facing a steady rise in truancy among high school students.
- The traditional thinking was that truancy was mainly driven by factors outside of school and thus there was little the schools could do.
- We identified the root causes of dropping out (the ultimate form of truancy), and it turned out several of the key reasons were actually controllable by the school.
- We also analyzed attendance records of thousands of students over several months. That analysis yielded an interesting insight that 40% of the worst truants at the end of the semester were actually not truants at the beginning of the semester. This suggested that the schools had had a least a chance to have an impact on those students before they became truants.
- We did a comparison of truancy rates among high schools, controlling for socio-economic status of the students, to find a good comparison set of best performing and worst performing schools in terms of truancy.
- We did on-site field research at both the best performing and worst performing schools to identify differences in management practices related to truancy.
- We found several specific differences in management practices, tools and techniques and documented them so that other schools could employ those same factors.
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