Which academically struggling students do you help? That’s a question that local school leaders constantly are forced to make.

You can focus intervention efforts on the early grades—and ensure that all children can read by the end of third grade. But that may require you to shortchange help for high school students on the verge of dropping out.

You can focus on dropout-prevention, counseling, and smaller learning environments at the high school—and then lack the money to help primary school children who are just starting to fall behind academically.

Or you can try to help both ends of the age spectrum—but stretch your resources so thinly that you never really solve anything.

So what should school policymakers do? Well, a new study by the Public Policy Institute of California cements my personal opinion. It examined student achievement in San Diego and found that you pretty much can identify which students will fail the state exit exam by fourth grade.

Hardly a surprise given what we know about academically struggling students. Those struggles start early—and only get worse with the years.

Some school districts share my perspective on these hard choices. They’ve quietly focused most of their reform efforts on the early grades, holding off high school reform a few years. The hope is that younger students will naturally lift academic achievement at the middle and high schools as they grow up—and make the challenges of later-grade reform all that much easier.

Also, it’s simply easier to intervene with younger students—and thus such efforts are more likely to succeed and positively affect more students.

The report’s authors appear to agree, expressing doubts about tutoring programs designed to help older students pass the state exit exams. “Our results strongly suggest that these 11th -hour interventions by themselves are unlikely to yield the intended results.”

Instead, they conclude, “moving a portion of these tutoring dollars to struggling students in the early grades . . .could be a wise choice. An ounce of prevention could indeed be worth a pound of cure.”

That’s a hard pill for some folks to swallow. The Los Angeles Times, in its coverage of the study, quoted a state legislator, who voiced the commonly heard refrain that “we shouldn’t be put in a position where we are pitting the outcomes of seniors against the future of preschoolers.”

True enough. But when the legislator added that such a choice “makes no sense,” I had to wonder what her solution is. Is she going to push through more state funding for schools?

You know the answer to that. State lawmakers are going to give you enough money to keep the schools open, and you’re going to have to make the touch choices.

So, what do you think is the best investment of your limited resources? Which students are you going to help?

Del Stover, Senior Editor