Research has shown that SDP’s 9th Grade On-Track metric is directly linked to on-time high school graduation. This research brief builds on these findings by examining the academic trajectories of SDP students from the 2013-14 first-time 9th grade cohort (the graduating class of 2017) who were on track to graduate after 9th grade. About two-thirds of these students were on-track entering 2014-15. For this analysis, ORE used Classification and Regression Tree (CART) modeling to divide these On-Track students into four subgroups based on their 9th-grade GPA and attendance. We found that a small group of on-track students (about 1 in 25) showed signs that they were likely to fall off track in later grades: these 9th-graders had relatively poor grades and attendance, and they had a four-year graduation rate of 47%.

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