Why High Schools Should Offer GED Prep Before Students Give Up
I saw Marcus sitting on the floor by the science wing, his back against the lockers, earbuds in but the tinny music audible from three feet away. It was mid-October, and he’d already missed twelve days of school. His first-period teacher had sent him out for putting his head down. He didn’t argue, didn’t complain. He just picked up his backpack and walked out.
I sat down next to him—not because I had a great strategy, but because the hallway was empty and that’s where the conversation was. I asked him what was going on. He pulled out one earbud and said, “I’m just gonna get my GED. My cousin did it. It’s faster.”
That’s the moment I think about a lot. Because Marcus wasn’t wrong. The GED is faster. It’s also cheaper, when you ignore the test fees and the prep course costs. And for a kid like Marcus, who’d spent years being told he was behind, the idea of a do-over outside the school building had real appeal.
But here’s what I knew that Marcus didn’t: his cousin had been trying to take the GED for eight months. There was a waitlist at the adult ed center. The practice tests cost twenty dollars each. The one prep class in the city ran Tuesday and Thursday nights across town, and his cousin worked closing shifts at a fried chicken place. Marcus had heard the success part. He hadn’t heard about the obstacles.
I’ve been teaching for eleven years. I’ve watched the GED get treated like an exit ramp off the highway of education—something you take when regular school “doesn’t work for you.” And I’ve watched that framing fail a lot of kids. Not because the test is too hard, but because getting to it is hard. There isn’t a clear path. There isn’t a teacher checking in. There isn’t a building that feels like it belongs to you.
We should offer GED prep in high schools. Not as a punishment. Not as a “slower track” that secludes students from their peers. As one of the real options a student can pick, with the same structure and support they’d get in any other class.
For a lot of students, the problem isn’t cognitive. It’s chronological. Somewhere in the middle of tenth grade, the pace of a typical classroom becomes genuinely unmanageable. They fail, get pulled into credit recovery, fail again because they’re still missing the same basic skills. By junior year, the transcript looks like a record of their worst months, not their ability. And the only thing the school offers is more of the same—more semesters, more seat time, more classes they’ve already mentally left.
A GED track changes the conversation. Instead of saying “you must stay on this conveyor belt,” the school is saying “here’s a different machine that gets you the same destination.” The difference isn’t academic. It’s practical. The GED rewards what a student actually knows now, not what they failed to learn three years ago. For a kid like Marcus, who reads well but can’t pass an algebra class because he missed three weeks of school with mono in eighth grade, that distinction matters. The test doesn’t care why he missed the material. It just asks if he can demonstrate it today.
But the logistics matter. I’m not suggesting schools post a flyer for an external program and call it support. I mean a real, in-building program. A classroom with a teacher who knows the GED content. A block of time built into the master schedule, not an after-school club that competes with sports and jobs. A system where a student can move from a standard diploma track to a GED track without having to unenroll, without losing access to the school, without being sent to a separate building across town.
I’ve seen it work, partially. A few years ago, a colleague of mine convinced our principal to let her run a “credit recovery plus GED prep” hybrid during fourth block. Four kids signed up initially. Two actually showed up consistently. She used a free online curriculum and gave them her lunch period twice a week to take practice tests. One of those kids—a girl named Destiny who’d been in and out of foster care—passed the GED in February of her junior year. She got into a certified nursing assistant program in April. She’s employed now.
I remember Destiny telling me about it. She said, “Mrs. Reyes never gave up on me.” But that wasn’t quite it. Mrs. Reyes didn’t just “not give up.” She gave her a thing to do. A concrete, measured, achievable thing. Practice tests. A schedule. A clear sense of what the test looked like and what score she needed. That’s the difference between telling a kid “you can do it” and saying “here’s the door.”
The practical side of a GED program isn’t complicated. Schools already have the space, the computers, and the adults. The materials are inexpensive and often free. The tests can be taken at school if there’s a certified proctor. The only real changes are attitudinal. We have to stop treating the GED as a consolation prize. It’s a high school equivalency credential. It opens doors. For many jobs, it sits right next to a diploma. For community colleges, it’s accepted. It’s not the emergency exit. It’s just a different door.
That doesn’t mean it’s right for everyone. A GED shouldn’t be used as a way to push struggling students out the door before they’re ready. But here’s the thing: students like Marcus are already leaving, whether we acknowledge the exit or not. Dropping out of high school doesn’t happen in one dramatic moment. It happens in a sequence of absences, unreturned calls, and classrooms they no longer feel part of. A GED program in the building is a way to catch them at the point where they’re leaning toward the door and say, “If you want to finish that way, we’ll help you. But you’re not leaving us.”
I sat with Marcus in the hallway until the bell rang. He didn’t go back to first period. He went to the bathroom, splashed water on his face, and said he’d come back tomorrow. I told him I’d look into what the GED actually involved in our county—the fees, the schedule, the nearest test center. He shrugged, but he asked me to text him. I did, and I sent him a link to the practice test.
He’s still in school, as far as I know. Some days he’s in class. Some days he’s not. But he knows there’s a path that doesn’t require him to vanish. That conversation didn’t fix him—nothing can fix a student in forty minutes. But it changed the math for him. The choice was no longer “keep failing at school” or “disappear and figure it out alone.” It was “try to keep up” or “let the school help me find another way.”
I think that’s the real work of schools. Not to keep every student in the same seat until the same age. But to make sure no student reaches the end of their options unprepared.
We haven’t built a full GED program in our school yet. It’s a proposal, a budget line item, a set of conversations. But the next time a kid like Marcus sits on the hallway floor, I want to have a real answer for him—not just a link to a county website. I want to say, “We have a room, and a teacher, and a plan. You don’t have to leave to finish.”
That’s the minimum. And honestly, right now, it would be a lot more than nothing.
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