In eighth grade, Eric thought he was going places. But by his second semester of freshman year at Hancock High, his D’s in Environmental Science and French, plus an F in Mr. Castillo’s Honors Algebra class, might have suggested otherwise. Research shows that students with more than one semester F during their freshman year are very unlikely to graduate. If Eric had attended Hancock—or any number of Chicago’s public high schools—just a decade earlier, chances are good he would have dropped out. Instead, Hancock’s new way of responding to failing grades, missed homework, and other red flags made it possible for Eric to get back on track.

The Make-or-Break Year is the largely untold story of how a simple idea—that reorganizing schools to get students through the treacherous transitions of freshman year greatly increases the odds of those students graduating—changed the course of two Chicago high schools, an entire school system, and thousands of lives. Marshaling groundbreaking research on the teenage brain, peer relationships, and academic performance, journalist turned communications expert Emily Krone Phillips details the emergence of Freshman OnTrack, a program-cum-movement that is translating knowledge into action—and revolutionizing how teachers grade, mete out discipline, and provide social, emotional, and academic support to their students.

This vivid description of real change in a faulty system will captivate anyone who cares about improving our nation’s schools; it will inspire educators and families to reimagine their relationships with students like Eric, and others whose stories affirm the pivotal nature of ninth grade for all young people. In a moment of relentless focus on what doesn’t work in education and the public sphere, Phillips’s dramatic account examines what does.