Efforts to improve educational attainment are hampered by the high school dropout crisis. At a time when governors are calling for changes to improve higher education access and success, more than 1 million youth ages 16 to 19 are not enrolled in school and do not have a high school diploma. Each year, an additional 390,000 youth drop out of…

The General Educational Development (GED[R]) Tests, established in 1945, helped determine soldiers' high school qualifications for the workforce, as they returned home from WWII. Because many soldiers dropped out of school to join the military, achieving a certain score on the test was a way for them to demonstrate that they had attained high…

This study aimed to describe the following: (1) how many dropouts attempt to change the course of their lives by returning to complete their diploma requirements; (2) what kinds of dropouts return; and (3) how the subsequent activities of this group differ from those of dropouts who remained out of school. Those groups shown by previous research…

One of the major barriers to making good on this promise is the broad set of misconceptions framing most discussions of the dropout issue. Too often, both public perception and public policy seem based on the notion that dropping out is confined to a small--and particularly unmotivated--group of young people. A related assumption, although rarely…

Migrant and seasonal farmworkers are the most educationally disadvantaged group in society, with over 70% high school dropouts and 15% functionally illiterate. Mobility, language barriers, and cultural differences combined with health and nutrition problems have a negative effect on school achievement. The constant interruption of the educational…

Reviews the history of night schools that provide secondary equivalency programs in the Soviet Union and Russia. Asserts that now is the appropriate time to make changes in the objectives and curriculum of these programs. Recommends that the curriculum be more differentiated so that a wider range of students can be served and broader educational…

Responses to a survey questionnaire completed by 1,070 migrant students who returned to school after dropping out were tabulated and listed by response frequency to determine student characteristics that will help migrant educators predict dropout behavior and address its causes. Participating students were enrolled in 13 High School Equivalency…

This ERIC digest examines the extent of early school leaving among migrants, conditions that precede early school leaving, common features of programs that work to retrieve dropouts, and illustrative programs that exhibit these features. The Migrant Attrition Project estimates a 45% national dropout rate of migrant students. Conditions that lead…

Students drop out of school for a wide variety of reasons. Programs to discourage dropping out must therefore accommodate the actual needs of individual students rather than aim at the assumed needs of the "typical dropout." This document reviews school policies and programs that could affect dropout tendencies positively. Among these…

Besides having to cope with the usual pressures associated with the transition to adulthood, dropouts must deal with the stigma attached to the fact that they are school dropouts. Research reveals that, for a variety of socioeconomic and psychological reasons, dropouts are generally less able to plan, less willing to work hard, and less skilled in…

Administrators, counselors, university faculty, and dropouts met initially to discuss the dropout problem and to design a questionnaire which was administered to 270 dropouts from secondary schools in 5 Missouri Ozark school districts and was designed primarily to determine the perceived need or desire for additional vocational or academic…

A study examined experiences of early leavers in the United States (US) and Australia in the first two years beyond high school. Data were from these comparable longitudinal surveys: US data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988; Australian data from the 1975 cohort of the Youth in Transition surveys. Findings indicated similar…