Education Week
Two teenage boys joking around before class starts—no big deal, right? Scenes like this play out every day at high schools across the country. But this one is part of a carefully orchestrated project to help students survive a make-or-break year in their lives: 9th grade.
The project uses 11th and 12th graders as its secret weapons, training them to shepherd freshmen through their perilous first year of high school, and set them on a glide path to graduation...