Can teaching resilience help solve the dropout crisis?

There is a lot of useful information in Beatrice Motamedi's three-part series on students and stress, but perhaps nothing more important to those engaged in the fight to end the dropout epidemic than this simple observation:

"The middle-class kids have already learned that if you fail, the world is not at an end. You learn from the earliest days that you can solve problems from a variety of ways," says Len Syme, professor emeritus at the UC Berkeley's School of Public Health. "Minority poor kids really have some catching up to do."

"Why do some teens overcome stress while others stumble? Is life hell, or is it a climb?" Motamedi writes. "Researchers say resilience is the answer and that it can be taught."

Can we fight the dropout crisis by teaching simple resilience? 

Well, it couldn't hurt.

In his work on educational resilience in high school dropouts, Johns Hopkins University researcher Jeffrey Wayman found that "dropouts who said they would finish school or that maintained they were still students were more likely to gain diplomas."

"Accordingly," Wayman wrote, "schools should strive to implement resilience-building strategies as
part of their curriculums and routines."

In other words, if we teach at-risk students to think positive about their educations, they probably will. And if they do — even if they drop out of school at some point — they're more likely to graduate in the long run.