Why high schools should offer GED prep programs before students drop out
I remember the first time a student asked me about the GED. It was a Tuesday in late November, right after lunch. She was a junior, and she sat down in the seat across from my desk, not in the chair where I usually talked to kids about scheduling conflicts or college applications. She didn’t look upset. She looked like she had finally figured something out.
“I’m going to take the test,” she said. “The GED. There’s a place downtown and they do a prep class at night.”
I nodded, but I was slow to respond because I was trying to think through what she was telling me. This student wasn’t failing. She was getting C’s. She showed up most days. But she was also living with her grandmother, working forty hours a week at a diner, and her older sisters had both dropped out before her. She had decided that two more years of high school was a luxury her life couldn’t afford.
I didn’t have a good answer for her then. I still don’t, not fully. But the moment sticks with me because she was one of the lucky ones. She had a ride to the adult learning center, a grandmother who could get her dinner on the table, and a manager at the diner who would give her hours around her study schedule. She had, in other words, a life that could accommodate the extra errand of getting a diploma.
Most students like her don’t have that. And that is exactly the problem with how we treat the GED in high schools.
The district I work in has a graduation rate around ninety percent, which sounds good until you walk the halls and look at who makes up the other ten. They’re not mysterious. They’re the kids in the back of English class who haven’t turned in an essay in a month. They’re the ones who come to school long enough to have their attendance mark taken and then leave. They’re the ones who look at the four-year plan we hand out in ninth grade the way you’d look at a map of a country you don’t plan to visit.
By junior year, many of them are already gone. The school calls it dropping out, but the truth is they did something closer to being slowly pushed. A missed credit here, a failed semester there. A parent who needed them at home. A job that paid just enough to keep the lights on. Each one a small, reasonable choice that stacked into a wall too high to climb.
The decision to leave school is never one dramatic moment. I’ve seen it happen in stolen quiet conversations in the hallway. A kid leans against the lockers and says, “What’s the point?” And the honest answer is that for some of them, the point is genuinely hard to explain. Of course, there are adults who say the point is a future, getting a job, self-respect. But to a sixteen-year-old working the closing shift at a fast food restaurant, those abstractions don’t pay for a broken phone. The GED starts to look like an exit door. And they take it.
Here is what I think happens so often: the student leaves, plans to enroll in an adult education program, and never makes it. They call the center and the next class is full. They can’t afford the bus fare. They start working full time and the whole idea becomes one more thing they failed at. They wanted a shortcut to a second chance, but they found out that the system had no interest in meeting them halfway.
A GED prep program inside the high school would change that. It would be an actual course, scheduled during the school day, taught by an instructor who knows the building and the kids. Not an after-school tutoring club. Not a list of printed resources to take home. But a real class for students who have decided that the traditional diploma path is no longer realistic for them.
I’ve seen variations of this work in other districts, and the details are simple. The same teachers who already handle credit recovery run it. The curriculum is straightforward. There are four tests on the GED now, and a lot of the content overlaps with the skills we’re already teaching in our classes. Students in the program still check in with their counselor every couple of weeks. They can still stay enrolled in the school, which means they keep an adult in their corner. They are not cut loose into the adult world to navigate a waiting list alone.
There’s a defensiveness you get from some parents when you bring this up. They say, “My kid is going to get a real diploma, not the easy way out.” And I understand that. I have those conversations in my own family. My mother-in-law taught high school for thirty years, and she said once that offering a GED in school tells kids that quitting is acceptable.
But I’ve come to see it differently. The GED is not a lower bar. It’s a different door. Research varies on the long-term outcomes for GED holders versus traditional graduates — some studies show the wage gap is real, others argue it’s more about the reasons someone left school than the credential itself. What I know from my own classrooms is that the students who are at the point of considering a GED are not choosing between a diploma and a shortcut. They are choosing between a school path that has become unbearable and a possibility of finishing something — anything — with their lives.
Take a student I’ll call Marcus. He had written off school by last winter. He was failing most of his classes and getting into arguments during the period when he was still trying to be present. One day in January, he told me he was done. He said, “I’m seventeen this spring. I can’t be in ninth grade anymore.” He meant that, academically, he was so far behind his age cohort that staying in school meant spending three more years around fourteen-year-olds. I tried to talk to him about credit recovery, about online options, about summer school. But nothing I offered looked like a way out to him.
Marcus did not pass his GED through an adult program. He actually tried, but the timing clashed with his shifts. He never got through the enrollment. Now he works full time at a grocery store, and I run into him now and then. He always says hello. He always asks how my year is going. And I always wonder if the answer could have been different if the doorway had been closer.
What would that look like in practice? A room down the hall from the rest of the classes. Four days a week, one period, students working through a workbook or practicing on a laptop with a testing program. The teacher knows each student’s name, knows what happened with their family last spring, knows when to push and when to leave them alone. Kids stay connected to the school, to the counselor, to the resources. They don’t vanish into the count of “where do they go?”
There are administrative hurdles. Every district is concerned about funding, and courses need to meet certain standards. But it’s not an impossible fit. We already have systems for students who need alternatives. We call them credit recovery or alternative schools. This would simply be another option, and one that keeps the student inside the building instead of pushing them out.
The truth is that no matter how good our programming is, some students will still leave. We can’t hold onto everyone. But the exit door should lead to something more than a parking lot. If a GED is going to be their path, the school should be the one walking it with them — not just pointing at it from across the street.
I still don’t know what happened to the junior who asked me about the GED that day in November. I hope she finished. But when I think about the students who made it, I think about the ones who had someone to help them fill out the forms. Those small moments of being shown how the system works are often the difference between a plan and a wish. A program inside the school would give more kids those moments. It would build the bridge a few feet shorter, close enough for a tired seventeen-year-old to actually cross. And maybe that would be enough — maybe for some, it already would be.
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