Many school districts have developed successful intervention programs to help students graduate high school on time. However, identifying and prioritizing students who need those interventions the most remains challenging. This paper describes a machine learning framework to identify such students, discusses features that are useful for this task, applies several classification algorithms, and evaluates them using metrics important to school administrators. To help test this framework and make it practically useful, we partnered with two U.S. school districts with a combined enrollment of approximately 200,000 students. We together designed several evaluation metrics to assess the goodness of machine learning algorithms from an educator's perspective. This paper focuses on students at risk of not finishing high school on time, but our framework lays a strong foundation for future work on other adverse academic outcomes.

Several hundred thousand students drop out of high school every year in the United States. Interventions can help those who are falling behind in their educational goals, but given limited resources, such programs must focus on the right students, at the right time, and with the right message. In this paper, we describe an incremental approach that can be used to select and prioritize students who may be at risk of not graduating high school on time, and to suggest what may be the predictors of particular students going off-track. These predictions can then be used to inform targeted interventions for these students, hopefully leading to better outcomes.