Giving Compass' Take:

• According to The Hechinger Report, the Building Assets, Reducing Risks (BARR) program targets ninth-grade students during a crucial transition in school by prioritizing strong relationships and putting a focus on student strengths.

• How can more schools around the country implement programs like this? Why have the results of BARR been relatively unknown for more than a decade?

• Read more on the Building Assets, Reducing Risks program and learning mindsets in schools.

There’s a school improvement model that has gotten consistent results in large schools, small schools, high-performing ones, low-performing ones, those with large achievement gaps, diverse schools, homogenous ones, and schools that are rural, urban and suburban. An impressive track record of hard evidence has made it the only program to earn three levels of competitive grant funding from the federal government since 2010.

The Building Assets, Reducing Risks program, known as BARR, was started by a Minneapolis school counselor in 1999, and remained in relative obscurity for a decade. Since 2010, its creator, Angela Jerabek, has sought research support to test the BARR program in other schools. The BARR mantra – “Same Students. Same Teachers. Better Results.” – has led Jerabek to aggressively seek out schools in different regions, with different demographics, to test her theory. So far, it holds up.

No matter where a school starts, the BARR model seems to make it better, and it does so without hiring all new teachers, transforming the school curriculum, or spending a lot of money – though it does require a strong commitment in time.

Read the full article about the Building Assets, Reducing Risks program by Tara García Mathewson at The Hechinger Report.