Why high schools should offer GED prep before students drop out
The last time I saw Marcus in my classroom, he wasn’t doing anything disruptive. He was just sitting there, cap pulled low, tracing the same circle on his desk with his thumb. It was late April. He’d turned sixteen in February. The week before, he’d asked me if I thought he was “too far gone” to catch up. I said the thing teachers say—”it’s not too late, you have time”—and he nodded the way kids nod when they’ve stopped believing adults.
Marcus was a sophomore on paper, but he had freshman credits in everything except art. He’d missed forty-one days that year. I knew from the guidance office that he was working nights at a grocery store, stocking shelves, helping his mom pay rent. He wasn’t lazy. He was just doing the math. High school was going to take him three more years, and he wasn’t sure he could afford three more years of anything.
I’ve taught long enough to know what happens next for a kid like Marcus. He’ll come to school less and less. Maybe he’ll get a warning letter. Maybe he’ll get pulled into a meeting with an administrator who’ll tell him he’s making a choice he can’t take back. And in most cases, he’ll leave. Maybe he’ll think about it for a month or two, and then he’ll sign up for the GED at the community center, where he’ll sit in a fluorescent-lit room with a manual, trying to remember algebra he was never really taught.
That’s the part that always bothered me. The GED isn’t a bad option. For a lot of people, it’s the option. But right now, we treat it like a door that only opens after you’ve fallen out of the building. We wait until a student has officially, formally, painfully dropped out. Then, and only then, we point them toward a different path. It makes no sense.
What would change if we offered GED prep inside the high school, during the normal school day, to students who are still enrolled?
I got to see what that might look like when I visited a district in Ohio a few years ago that had started doing exactly that. They had a small room in the back of the building, next to the industrial arts shop, with about eighteen desks and a retired English teacher who ran the program. The students in that room were juniors and seniors, mostly. They were behind on credits. Some had attendance problems. A few had been in foster care. All of them, according to the principal, had one thing in common: they were on track to not graduate.
The program was simple. Instead of sitting through a fourth-period biology class they’d already failed once, these students went to GED prep. They worked on the five subjects at their own pace, using a mix of workbooks and online modules. The English teacher was there to answer questions, but mostly she was there to hold them accountable. Show up. Do the work. Take the practice test. Another teacher came in during her prep period to help with math.
What struck me wasn’t the curriculum. It was how normal it felt. No one in that room was being treated as a lost cause. They were just kids doing schoolwork, like kids in any other classroom. And the school didn’t stop caring about them—they still had a counselor, they still had a caseworker, they still had lunch in the same cafeteria. They were still part of the community. They were just working on a different document.
I remember talking to one girl, probably eighteen, who’d been out of school for almost a year and had come back because the GED program was the only reason she’d re-enrolled. She said something I’ve never forgotten: “Nobody ever explained to me that I could do this and not have to say I dropped out.”
That phrase—”not have to say I dropped out”—stayed with me. Because a lot of our resistance to in-school GED programs comes from a fear that we’d be signaling failure. That offering a GED path is surrendering. But what I saw in Ohio was the opposite. Those kids looked relieved. They weren’t being told they were hopeless. They were being told that we knew the standard path wasn’t working for them, and we had another route.
Here’s what I’d say to a school or a district thinking about this. You don’t need a big budget. You need a room, a willing teacher, and a way to pay for the test vouchers, which are often free or discounted through state programs. You need a policy that lets students opt into GED prep without formally withdrawing. And you need at least one staff member whose job it is to sit with the student and ask, honestly, “Which path makes more sense for you right now?”
That last part is the one that matters most. Because the real problem isn’t that kids don’t want to graduate. It’s that we’re not giving them an honest conversation about options. We say “stay in school” like it’s a one-size-fits-all answer, but for some kids, staying in school means sitting in class after class they’ve already failed, watching the credits stack against them. That’s not engagement. That’s waiting.
I think about Marcus in that April classroom. I didn’t know about in-school GED programs then, so I just gave him the standard speech. He came to school about a dozen more times that year, tried to redo a few assignments, failed two classes, and didn’t come back in the fall. I didn’t see him leave. I just saw the empty desk.
If his school had offered what that Ohio school offered, our conversation might have been different. I could have said, “There’s a classroom down the hall where you can work toward your GED during the school day, and you can keep your gym period, and you can still eat lunch with your friends. It doesn’t mean you’re quitting. It means you’re taking a different route to the same place.”
I don’t know if Marcus would have taken it. Maybe he would have looked at me the same way and nodded the same empty nod. But I think there’s a chance he would have stayed. I think there’s a chance he would have walked down that hallway and sat in that small room with the retired English teacher, and he would have started to believe that someone in that building had looked at his actual life and thought, “Here’s something you can finish.”
We talk a lot about saving kids from dropping out. But we don’t talk enough about what we’re actually offering them to stay. Right now, for a student who is truly not going to graduate in four years, the options are stuck in a failing system or leave with nothing. That’s a terrible menu.
An in-school GED program adds a third option. It’s not the perfect solution. It doesn’t solve housing instability or the fact that a sixteen-year-old has to work forty hours a week. It doesn’t make up for years of lost learning. But it gives a kid something to walk toward instead of just something to walk away from. And that, I think, is worth a room, a teacher, and an honest conversation.
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