Harlem Renaissance High School, a transfer school in East Harlem, offers programs tailored to the needs of students previously off-track from graduating. (Photo by Rachael Horowitz)

Dashawn Gadsen left John F. Kennedy High School in the Bronx without a diploma after four years of poor attendance. Overage and under-credited, he entered Harlem Renaissance High School in 2008, at the age of 17, in the hopes of turning around his academic record. “A real person will admit to their mistakes,” he said of his years at JFK, where his problems had less to do with his classes and more to do with his not showing up. “I had to break out of it.”

The Department of Education does not freely offer public records of overage students like Gadsen in the system, but it does offer a definition of overage as being two or more years older than the standard age for a grade. Gadsen is at risk for dropping out due to his age and his lack of credits, but unlike him, many at-risk students are already overage by the time they leave middle school, if not earlier. About 65 percent of the students in the city who drop out of high school were overage when they began ninth grade, according to a 2008 study from the department’s Office of Accountability.

Students become overage when they repeat grades, either because they don’t meet the promotional criteria or because of interruptions in their schooling, like foster care or frequent family relocation. “They’re overage because they’ve gone through a series of systems that haven’t met their needs,” said Shadia Alvarez, an aspiring principal at Harlem Renaissance High School, from which Gadsen hopes to graduate in August. “By the time we get them, they come in fighting us. We have to break down that wall in order to gain access to help and support them.”

Alvarez is training to become a principal through the New York City Leadership Academy and has been at Harlem Renaissance – a transfer school that accepts only students who have already been in ninth grade and are considered off-track for graduation – since August. The students are part of a group categorized by the Department of Education as under-credited, and as a result, more than 1 in 4 is also overage – older than the typical student in his or her grade.

The number of overage students in the city is significant and extends to all five boroughs, according to Christie Hill, a staff attorney for Advocates for Children of New York, an education access advocacy group, but disproportionate numbers are non-native English speakers, students with special needs and students of color. Ninety-eight percent of students at Harlem Renaissance Academy are African-American or Latino.

Advocates for Children is in the process of analyzing the Department of Education’s data on overage students to make recommendations and raise awareness, “so people know that a 16- or 17-year-old in eighth grade is not all that uncommon in New York City,” Hill said.

The issue of overage students is tied to promotion and retention policies in school – when students are allowed to pass from one grade to the next. Because overage students are less likely to graduate from high school, some people equate leaving back a student with giving him or her a dropout sentence.

However, the Department of Education released a report in October detailing the success of the latest fifth-grade retention and promotion policy, requiring students to earn a level 2 out of 4 in both math and English language arts proficiency tests before they advance to sixth grade. A level 2 generally indicates that the student is approaching grade level standards in the subject. The department began implementing the policy with third graders in 2003 and extended it to include fifth graders in 2004 and commissioned the RAND Corporation to conduct a study of its effectiveness.

Very few fifth graders – approximately 600 – were retained during the first three years of the policy, according to Jennifer McCombs a co-author of the study, which followed three cohorts of fifth graders from 2005 to 2007. A small number of those students were multiple holdovers, meaning they had already been retained once before: 126 in the first year and 56 in the third year.

“The majority of overage fifth graders end up being promoted,” McCombs said, supporting the conclusion that the impact of the fifth grade promotion policy on the number of overage students already in the system is minimal, and that it has increased student performance overall.

Despite RAND’s results, critics of retention still point to longstanding research correlating retention and lower graduation rates. “Retaining a student even one time puts them on a track to drop out at an exponential rate,” Hill said. She is particularly critical of the way retention is implemented in the city, where students who don’t meet promotional criteria in one area must repeat the entire year’s curriculum. “It keeps them off track,” she said, adding that if the Department of Education wants to use retention, it needs to “be smarter,” about it.

Concerns about overage students are frequently expressed in high-need schools where students are more likely to be retained, said McCombs. But researchers at RAND believe that as performance continues to increase in schools, over time the number of overage students will drop off. “It’s a very small population, but there’s grave concerns around these kids,” McCombs said.

The department has acknowledged the challenges of the overage population, a major, but less often discussed subset of the dropout population, and as a result is targeting it specifically at the high school level with the Office of Multiple Pathways to Graduation. The office allows schools like Harlem Renaissance to tailor to the needs of students who’ve fallen off the traditional time line for high school graduation. “We recognize that it’s not just ‘Brand X,’ ” said Tom Pendleton, the director of learning to work initiatives at the Office of Multiple Pathways to Graduation, one of the programs available to the overage, under-credited high school population, which according to Alvarez has offered a lot of support to Harlem Renaissance. “There’s not just one student who falls behind in high school,” Pendleton said.

Elisia Burrows likes to go by the name “Star.” In 10th grade, she took a yearlong break from school after the birth of her son, Sincere. When she returned to school, she chose Harlem Renaissance because it offers on-site daycare for her son. Now 20 years old, she can’t imagine herself at a “regular” high school. “It’s embarrassing,” she said. Burrows plans to graduate in June.

At Harlem Renaissance High School, students are not divided by grade level, but rather, by how many credits they’ve earned in an effort to target the specific needs of each student. In early December, the school’s credit recovery week gave students the opportunity to “recover” hours of missed coursework. Students flowed in and out of Alvarez’s office, eager to make up the credits they need in order to stay on track for graduation. This year the school implemented a computer-assisted program for credit recovery and students had questions about login information, passwords and assignments.

During this time, students at Harlem Renaissance worked busily on laptops in each classroom for a singular purpose: catch up. While this wasn’t what a typical day looks like at the school, it reflected the atmosphere there: one that encourages students who are off-track to take control of their academic future. Alvarez explained, “We’re trying to create an environment where people don’t see that as a negative, but as a possibility.”

“The work going on at the high school level is needed,” Hill said. “But we do need to do the work earlier.” She is optimistic about the Office of Multiple Pathways to Graduation’s efforts and recommends that middle schools follow suit. “A 16-year-old in eighth grade has different needs than a 13-year old,” Hill said. She explained that middle schools should be authorized to be “flexible” to meet the needs of these students and keep them invested with half-day programs, midyear promotion to high school, or increased access to high school curriculum to earn credits even if they’ve been retained.

This year the Office of Multiple Pathways to Graduation also opened the High School for Excellence and Innovation, designated for students who turned 16 in the eighth grade, and according to Pendleton, the city is opening more transfer schools each year. While these interventions show promise for an under-served population, some worry that it’s not enough. “The resources do not meet the demand,” Hill said, noting the long waiting lists for many of these new schools.

Alvarez is also concerned about the large numbers of students requiring the type of specialized academic setting offered at Harlem Renaissance, which serves 230 students and has increased its class sizes. “The DOE will send you everyone if they think you have a supportive environment,” she said. “But they’re not taking into account what happens when you overpopulate a classroom.”

Though the resources may not yet meet the need, acknowledging the unique needs of overage students is a step for the Department of Education in reining in the number of high school dropouts. “New York is one of our leading cities in terms of addressing the dropout crisis,” said Chris Sturgis, former consultant to the U.S. Department of Education on secondary school strategies, and co-founder of the Youth Transition Funders Group, a network of grant organizations focusing on young adults in need of extra support.

Hill also acknowledged the work of advocacy groups and non-profits in supporting the overage population in New York. “There’s lots of good work going on across the city,” she said, “but they’re in their own silos not communicating.”