In our “Reading Lists” we collect the tastiest articles, podcast episodes, and videos from the Unboxed archives for your enjoyment and edification!
This collection is called “stories of improvement with tangible results” and we’ve split these stories up by category—chronic absenteeism, on-track rates, and college access—to make it easy for you to find the story you need!
Chronic Absenteeism
Cutting chronic absenteeism by over 50% through creative parent communication, data checks, and public sliming
Tangible result: During the 2024-2025 school year Hamilton Elementary School cut its chronic absenteeism rate from 24% to 10%.
How they did it:
- Before school started, staff conducted home visits with families of the previous year’s most chronically absent students
- Sent short “nudge letters” with a simple bar graph showing a specific child’s absences set against the school average
- Logged every intervention by student to track what was working for whom, and regularly pruned strategies that weren’t reaching the chronically absent students specifically
- Used incentives such as a school-wide “sliming” of the principal to build school-wide investment early, then phased out incentives as norms shifted
Listen to the episode
Tackling Chronic Absenteeism at an Alternative High School by Asking Students What They Need
Tangible result: Respect Academy, an alternative high school in Denver, increased first period attendance by 16 percentage points.
How they did it:
- Conducted focus groups with students to understand why first-period advisory attendance was low, and learned that students were “economists with their time” making a rational decision to sleep in or do other work rather than go to a class that didn’t seem valuable to them
- Transformed advisory into “Character Ed,” where students voted weekly on topics they wanted to learn (investment planning, taxes, art projects, etc.)
- Started the new class with two teachers, gradually expanded it and eventually took it school-wide
Listen to the episode
Increasing Attendance for Hispanic Students in Alexandria, Virginia through adaptive texting and improved professional development
Tangible result: Over the course of two months, Ferdinand T. Day Elementary School saw attendance by Hispanic students increase by seven percentage points.
How they did it:
- Used root-cause analysis and discovered the real drivers of absenteeism were factors within the school’s control — not the family circumstances that many staff initially assumed were to blame
- Sent text messages to the families of chronically absent students in the language spoken at home, with information about the individual student’s attendance
- Built shared ownership among classroom teachers through a staff meeting where teachers each chose one attendance strategy to commit to, with improvement coaches following up to support them
Read the article
On-Track
Slashing the D/F Rate at Bell Middle School by Grading What Matters and Building Belonging
Tangible result: In 2022, Bell Middle School’s D&F rate was 51%. By 2024, it had dropped to 28%. Specifically for low-income students, the D&F rate was 67% in 2022, and Bell cut it to 29% in 2024.
How they did it:
- Built relationships and belonging through “2×10” conversations (two minute conversations with a single student over ten days)
- Shifted grading to focus primarily on demonstrations of learning rather than completed work and reduced graded homework
- Gave students opportunities to retake assessments until they demonstrated mastery
- Held biweekly “huddle meetings” where teachers reviewed D&F lists together, comparing notes on which students needed support and what was already working for them elsewhere
Listen to the episode
Improving 8th grade on track results for students furthest from opportunity by shifting teacher mindsets
Tangible results: Dallas schools in the Institute for Learning network for school improvement increased eighth grade on track for Black and Latinx students by more than 25 percentage points since 2018.
They also improved on track rates for emerging bilingual students from 35% to 80%.
How they did it:
- Teachers conducted empathy interviews with students, who described feeling like they were in “a factory” — input that helped teachers see the problem as collective rather than isolated to their own classroom
- Improvement coaches helped teachers notice when they were using deficit language (“the students don’t want to do the work”) rather than focusing on instruction
- Improvement coaches worked with district leadership to shift classroom observations away from rewarding strict curriculum fidelity and toward recognizing adapted, student-centered instruction — addressing a disconnect where teachers were evaluated (and paid) based on on compliance rather than testing and identifying practices that actually worked
Listen to the episode
Improving 8th Grade On-Track in ELA and Math at Teach Plus by spreading small changes across lots of classrooms
Tangible result: At Teach Plus’ partner schools, the percentage of eighth grade students who were considered on track in English language arts, or ELA for short, jumped from just 13% at the start of the NSI in 2021, to 49% in 2024.
To get more granular, when the Teach Plus NSI started in 2021, only 6% of black eighth graders were on track in ELA. In 2024, 51% of black eighth graders were on track in ELA.
How they did it:
- Identified that math classrooms were heavy on teacher-question/student-answer exchanges but lacked genuine student-to-student discourse, then piloted math discussion protocols in one classroom before spreading them to the whole team
- Used a student-voice survey (PERTS) at multiple checkpoints throughout the year, rather than only at year’s end, so teachers could act on what students said while there was still time to change something
Listen to the episode
Improving Grade 9 On Track via the Power of Data Routines
Tangible result: Since 2015, RISE partner schools have improved grade nine on-track rates by 15 percentage points from 67% to 82%.
How they did it:
- Gave teaching teams dedicated, protected meeting time (replacing other duties) several times a week, with clear roles, a recurring agenda, and a shared data tool that made student-level data instantly accessible
- Used structured protocols that start with a student’s strengths before moving to areas of growth
- Shifted coaches from facilitating Improvement Team meetings themselves to coaching school staff to run the meetings on their own, so the work became the school’s rather than something done “to” them
- Paired hard data routines with regular, visible celebration of teacher effort — like a quarterly “data showcase” with ice cream, where the disaggregated data literally decorates the table
Listen to the episode
College Access
Improving FAFSA Completion Rates by Tracking (and following up with) Individual Students
Tangible Result: In two years, the CARPE network increased FAFSA completion rates from 64% to 75%.
How they did it:
- Supported students to complete FAFSA in October
- Kept an updated list of all students who had not yet completed FAFSA
- Offered help to families with filling out the FAFSA, and invited them to special events where this support was offered
- Made FAFSA support part of the school day, not just something that happened after school
Improving FAFSA Completion Rates, by Ben Daley
Increasing College Applications by Better Understanding the Application Process
Tangible result: At High Tech High North County, the percentage of students applying to four-year colleges increased from 84% in 2014 to 93% in 2015
How they did it:
- The school director went through the college application process himself and found it more confusing than expected!
- The school embedded application support directly into existing structures, particularly the school’s “advisory” program
- Surveyed seniors to find out what was hardest about the process, learned it was the personal statement, and addressed that by having all juniors draft personal statements the year before, in their humanities class
Read the article
Increasing College Enrollment by Making It Everybody’s Business
Tangible Result: In 2020, only 46% of seniors at High Tech High International enrolled in four-year colleges. In 2022 the school increased that percentage to 70%.
How they did it:
- Built a school-wide system that treated college enrollment as a shared faculty responsibility rather than a counselor’s caseload
- Used a “milestone tracker” to segment students by need
- Offered application and financial aid support during the school day
- Sent students weekly texts from known adults during the summer to prevent “summer melt.”
Read the article
Smoothing the path from two-year to four-year colleges
Tangible result: Nationally, transfer student enrollment has dropped by 16% over the past nine years, but nearly 90% of the universities in the transfer success NIC led by NASH have increased transfer student enrollment over the past two years. Here are two specific examples. In Kentucky, Western Kentucky University has increased transfer student enrollment by 57%, and in Pennsylvania, Kutztown College has increased transfer student enrollment by 72%.
How they did it:
- Paired each four-year institution with its local feeder community college and had them build a joint process map of the transfer student’s experience, showing each institution how their own processes were creating obstacles for the other
- Started every test of change small (often with just 5–10 students), so a failed test was low-risk and reversible
Listen to the episode
