Why High Schools Need GED Prep Programs: A Teacher’s Story
Third period was English II, and Marcus was already asleep before the bell rang. His head was down on the desk, one arm wrapped around his backpack like it was a body pillow. I’d been teaching long enough to know the difference between a kid who stayed up too late gaming and a kid who was genuinely running on empty. Marcus was running on empty. His eyes, when he finally lifted them, had that gray look you see in adults who’ve worked a double shift, not in sixteen-year-olds.
I let him sleep for the first ten minutes. That was the not-proud part. The pragmatic part. Because I knew if I woke him up and pushed him through a worksheet on thesis statements, he’d just put his head back down. So I waited until the rest of the class was writing, then walked over and knelt beside his desk.
“Marcus,” I said quietly. “You okay?”
He blinked. “Yeah. Just tired.”
“You work last night?”
“Got off at eleven. Then I had to finish an essay for Ms. Calloway.” Even half asleep, he found a way to complain about another teacher.
The thing is, Marcus was smart. Not in a movie-of-the-week way, like he was secretly a math genius who just needed the right mentor. I mean he was quick-witted, good with people, funny in that dry way that made other kids lean in. He could read a room better than most adults. But reading Romeo and Juliet? He didn’t see the point. And calculus? He wasn’t in calculus. He was in a math class he’d already failed once, trying to scrape together the credits he needed just to be a sophomore.
After a few minutes, I asked him what he wanted to do with his life. He shrugged. “Get a job. Not a dead-end one, but, like, a real one. Maybe HVAC, or something with computers.” He paused. “But I don’t need this.” He gestured around the room, at the posters of literary devices, at the stack of journals on my desk. “I just need to get out.”
That shouldn’t have stung as much as it did. But there it was. For Marcus, school was a waiting room. He wasn’t learning. He was serving time.
And honestly? For him, that wasn’t entirely wrong.
We don’t like to say that out loud. We talk about reaching every student and differentiating instruction, but the reality is that some kids are in class every day, passing just enough to stay enrolled, and they are not going to graduate. Not because they’re lazy, but because they’re too far behind in credits and too disconnected from the material to see the point anymore. They’re sixteen, seventeen, maybe eighteen. The traditional path says they need three more years of this, with the constant risk of failing one more class and watching the finish line move even further away.
What those kids need is not the traditional path. What they need is a GED prep program, right inside the same building.
I saw it work once, a few years back. A neighboring district started a pilot program for exactly these students. They were still enrolled in the high school—so they still had access to the counseling office, free breakfast, the library, and teachers who knew them—but their schedule was completely different. They spent two hours every morning working through GED prep materials with a dedicated instructor. Then the afternoon was for work, or for vocational classes at the community college, or anything else that kept them connected to the building. The point wasn’t a diploma. It was a goal that was actually within reach.
One of the teachers there explained it to me simply. “A diploma tells a student to wait. A GED tells a student they can move now.”
I think about Marcus. If his school had offered something like that, he wouldn’t have needed to fall asleep in my class. He would’ve had a reason to show up at 8 a.m. that wasn’t a court order or a parent nagging him. He would have been working toward something that felt real to him.
And that’s the part I keep coming back to. The GED gets a bad reputation. People assume it’s for dropouts, for people who failed, for people who couldn’t hack it. But for a kid like Marcus, taking the traditional path isn’t a virtue—it’s just longer. More chances to fail. More months of showing up to a place that has clearly told him he’s not on track.
Offering GED prep in high schools does more than just give kids a plan. It eliminates the moment of walking out the door. That moment is the problem. When a kid officially drops out, they stop having any safety net. The school stops checking on them. The teachers stop knowing their names. They become a statistic, and nobody calls.
But if the GED path is available inside the same building, there’s no clean break. There’s no dramatic exit. The kid just transitions from one track to another. They still have a locker. Maybe they still see their old friends in the hall. They still have an adult who asks how their shift went.
I’m not naive about the politics of it. Some parents in my district would push back. They’d say, why are we giving kids a shortcut to a GED when they should be working harder? And I get that instinct. I really do. But no amount of hard work is going to turn a kid who is five credits behind and exhausted into a graduating senior on the same timeline. The “work harder” approach usually ends with the kid dropping out anyway, and then getting the GED through an adult program that charges money, in a building full of strangers.
So why not offer it earlier? Why not offer it here?
In a practical sense, it wouldn’t take much. A room. A teacher or an online curriculum. A partnership with a local community college. Students who are at risk of dropping out—we know who they are. They have attendance patterns. They have credit deficiencies. They’re slipping. We could identify them and simply say, here’s another way. Here’s a track that gets you to the same place, but realistically, for you.
There are real obstacles. Transportation for the afternoon work components. Funding for staffing. Liability when students leave campus for part of the day. And the quiet, unspoken worry that offering GED prep might encourage more kids to stop trying. That last one I think about often. Because maybe it would. Maybe a handful of students who could have scraped through with a diploma would take the GED route instead. But I look at the kids in my class who have already given up, and I wonder: what’s the difference between a kid who takes the GED route at sixteen and a kid who sits in my classroom with his head on the desk for the same amount of time and then drops out at seventeen anyway?
At least the first one is going somewhere.
Marcus doesn’t end up in a GED program. His district doesn’t have one. I don’t know exactly what happens to him. I changed schools the next year, and his name passed out of my orbit. I hope he got his HVAC certification. I hope he makes decent money. But every time I hear about a teenager who dropped out and then spent months trying to find a place to prepare for the GED—a program that’s three towns over, or costs $150 a month, or only takes adults over eighteen—I picture him sitting in the back of my room, head down, backpack looped around his arm, waiting.
A GED program wouldn’t have been a savior. It wouldn’t have been perfect. But it would have been something. It would have been an acknowledgment from his school that we saw him, that we understood the path he was on, that we weren’t just waiting for him to fail enough to stop showing up. It would have been a door that didn’t require him to walk out of the building first.
I think high schools should have that door. We talk a lot about keeping kids in school, but for some kids, the most honest way to keep them is to give them a way forward—a better way than the one they’d find on their own. That’s the thing we keep missing. The GED isn’t the quiet failure of the system. The quiet failure is pretending every kid needs the same four-year plan, when so many kids—kids like Marcus—just need a plan they can actually survive.
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