In April, 2008, Suzanne Morse of the Pew Partnership for Civil Change had a meeting with Dr. Rita Bishop, the new superintendent of Roanoke City Schools. Dr. Bishop didn’t know that Morse was the mover behind the Learning to Finish Wiki and the Finish Line Calculator. But in that meeting, the woman charged with improving educational outcomes in Roanoke showed Morse a printout from the calculator as proof that Roanoke had work to do: The calculator revealed that based on data from 2004 and 2005, only 51% of 9th grade students are likely to finish high school. The numbers in Roanoke are bleak, but knowing her calculator was becoming a go-to place to good data was a triumph for Morse.
In fact it was the Finish Link Calculator introduced in the Fall of 2007 that put the Learning to Finish wiki on the map. The Calculator is a tool that allows users to quantify high school dropout trends and see projected graduation rates for individual school districts, states, and the United States as a whole. Up until they introduced this data-rich, somewhat addictive, searchable, sortable tool, the wiki itself hadn’t attracted the level of buy-in and participation from the nonprofit, civic and education worlds as hoped. The calculator changed that equation.
In the past year, Morse reports the site has received over 500, 000 hits. The calculator caught viral buzz from The National League of Cities and its 40,000 members; blogs such as The College Puzzle; national organizations such as the National Center for Deliberative Democracy, business groups such as the Oklahoma State Chamber of Commerce and policy group such as The Bell Policy Center and Education Commission of the States. “This issue and this medium reached far into our communities through a variety of sources,” said Morse.
The Pew Partnership provided funding to place Google ads linking users to the site. Morse says this effort was only moderately successful, but it helped boost traffic based on searches of key words like “dropout” and “high school completion.”
Ahead on the horizon: The Superintendent of Public Instruction for the Commonwealth of Virginia is considering incorporating the wiki into a new dropout prevention initiative. And Morse plans to update the content and links on the wiki and seek additional funding to update the calculator with 2006 data.
