Why We Should Offer GED Prep Programs in High Schools, Not Just After Students Leave
It was about halfway through third period when I noticed Marcus had stopped writing. He wasn’t sleeping, exactly, but he had that faraway look I’ve learned to recognize. The notebook in front of him was open, but the page was blank. We were reviewing some basic algebra for the unit test, and his eyes were fixed on the ceiling tiles, as if he were counting them.
Marcus was a junior. He was seventeen, he came to school most days, and he never caused trouble. But he hadn’t passed a math credit since sophomore year. And the truth—though no one said it out loud—was that he wasn’t going to graduate on time with his class. He knew it, I knew it, and his mom knew it. But nobody had told him what the alternative might look like.
That’s the hole we have in our high school system. We make arrangements for the kids who are on track. We make arrangements for the kids who are failing badly enough to get flagged. But the vast middle—the kids who are just quietly not accumulating credits, not waking up with enough energy for the whole day, not seeing a point—they just kind of drift until they are eighteen and the system spits them out.
About a month later, Marcus asked me if he could stay after class for a minute. He leaned against the doorframe and said, “I think I need to drop out.” He said it fast, like ripping off a bandage. “I’m not going to graduate. My mom needs me working more, and I’m just wasting everyone’s time here.”
The typical response, of course, is to do the “you’re so close, let’s find a way” speech. But I had seen that speech fail too many times. You can’t reasonably ask a student to recover three years of failed credits in eight months while holding a part-time job and dealing with whatever is going on at home. So instead of giving him that speech, I sat with the silence for a minute.
What I wanted to tell him was this: he didn’t have to drop out. Not in the way he imagined, anyway. The problem wasn’t that Marcus was incapable. The problem was that we had built a system with only two doors—diploma on time, or dropping out and navigating the world alone.
More schools should have a third door. Actually, some do, but they don’t talk about it. It’s called a GED prep program, and I think it should be offered to high school students before they leave the building, not just after they’ve already gone.
I know what the stereotype is. People hear “GED” and they picture somebody at an adult learning center, sitting next to a stack of dusty textbooks after a long shift. They see it as the consolation prize, the “lesser than.” But in the real world, in the professional world, employers mostly want to see that you have a credential and can show up on time. The GED is not a dead end. It is a completely legitimate path to community college, trade school, or full-time work.
So why do we wait until students are fully out to encourage it? Why do we let them spiral through credit recovery classes that they fail anyway because they don’t have time for the homework? The stigma is the whole problem. We treat it as a last resort, and so we only offer it when it’s far too late.
For a student like Marcus, a GED couldn’t replace high school—it wouldn’t give him the senior year experience, the prom, or the football games. But he already didn’t care about any of that. He cared about getting out of this situation and becoming someone who wasn’t tied to a desk where he was never going to find success.
What would it look like if we offered him a GED prep program inside the high school? Let’s say Marcus sits in a small cohort of other juniors and seniors who are in a similar range. They aren’t being kicked out, but they are being honest about the trajectory. They still show up to the same building every day. They still get a school lunch. They still have a teacher who knows their name, and they still have access to the bus network. But instead of relearning the quadratic formula in a class of thirty kids that they physically cannot pass, they are practicing the specific kind of algebra that shows up on the GED test. They are working on the four subjects—math, science, social studies, language arts—at a self-directed pace.
I have seen the standard alternative, the “dropout recovery center,” often located in a basement of an office building off a main road. And there are good people there, doing good work. But the barrier to entry is always high. You have to know the program exists, you have to find transportation to the center, and you have to feel okay about stepping into a building full of strangers. For a seventeen-year-old who has never been taught to advocate for themselves, that is a massive hurdle. It’s not just about retaining the education; it’s about retaining the support system.
If you keep the program in the high school, the transition is less of a leap. You can work with the schedule so that the prep class is period four, right after lunch. You can have a guidance counselor check in weekly, not to nag them about credits, but literally just to ask if they’ve been sleeping. That might sound like soft advice, but it’s the kind of orthopedic support that actually keeps a kid coming back.
There are logistical hurdles, sure. State laws are a big one. Most states won’t allow a student to take the GED until they’re eighteen or have officially withdrawn, even if they are sixteen or seventeen. That’s a policy that needs to shift. Why make them wait? We are just guaranteeing that they’ll spend another year or two languishing in a system that has already failed them.
The last time I saw Marcus, he was cleaning out his locker at the end of the school year. He wasn’t officially dropping out that day. He was going to try one more summer credit recovery, determined to prove something to his mom. I guess I hope that works. But I also think about how different it could be if we had said, “Marcus, we see you, and we know the math isn’t going to get done in time. Here’s a real pathway we can take together, right here, in this building.”
The door doesn’t have to be either/or. It can be both/and. We can encourage a student to work toward a high school diploma while simultaneously preparing them for the reality of their timeline. We can hold space for the fact that they might not get that diploma until they’re twenty-five, that they might take a GED test this fall, and that all of that is okay.
I don’t know if Marcus would have taken the seat had we offered it. Maybe he would have refused. But the inquiry is not about him; it’s about the dozens of quiet Marci in other classrooms, who are still lying low, waiting for someone to tell them that there’s a path that doesn’t involve vanishing into thin air. We don’t need to wait until they ask. We can put a desk in the corner of the building and tell them it’s theirs.
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