Growing concern about the quality of public education in the United States has driven numerous educational reform efforts across the last three decades. These reforms include increased accountability as exemplified by various requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, the introduction of new curriculum and instructional methods in…

Compulsory attendance policies have been instituted in higher education with the expectation that academic achievement will improve, but empirical research on this relationship is equivocal. One theory of motivation posits that students' motivational beliefs, classroom context, and student behaviors are important variables in academic achievement.…

This paper presents and discusses data based on the perceptions of 128 persistent school absentees on their initial and continued reasons for missing school. The findings suggest that a greater proportion of the students were inclined to blame their institutions, rather than social or psychological factors, for their behavior. (SSH)