A concerted effort to pool resources and coordinate work by federal, state, and local educational agencies will be necessary to overcome the fragmentation that is occurring due to the current climate of changing demographics, increasing illiteracy, and the social effects of minorities in our schools. California has shown major changes in the…

This report develops a topology of approaches to high school dropout prevention, and uses it to examine and review the effectiveness of existing programs, and to identify major gaps in current practice and research. Research on dropouts was reviewed to identify the kinds of students who drop out and their reasons for dropping out. Based on this…

Intervention aimed at the development of social support networks provides a means for preventing some of the physical, emotional, and social problems of both long-term and transient rural residents. Individuals living in rural and remote communities face several contextual problems, including distance, personal and professional isolation, unique…

This handbook, structured to facilitate use by policy makers, practitioners, school board members and school staff, contains three parts. Part I presents practical information and an action plan for implementing school improvement and delinquency prevention measures. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on how delinquency affects the U.S. educational system,…

This document contains Congressional and nondepartmental witness testimony from the Congressional hearing on youth drug abuse in New York. Opening statements are presented on the incidence of drug use in America, the role of the federal government, the impact of drugs on youth, foreign country production of illegal drugs, funding to fight illegal…

The importance of following prescribed principles in the implementation of an effective law-related education (LRE) program is emphasized. Based on research findings that law-related education is a delinquency-prevention technique, the fact sheet lists six prescriptions for providing effective law-related education programs: (1) the use of…

Alternatives, the Drug and Alcohol Prevention Program of Community School District 22 in Brooklyn, N.Y., is a broad-based substance abuse prevention program funded by the state that provides direct services to students and their families through three service modalities. These are prevention services, which provide students, parents, and the…

This report describes two studies completed by the Child Advocacy Commission of Durham, North Carolina. The Durham school system has one of the lowest retention rates of any system in the state. The studies were used to advocate for and help implement new and better dropout prevention strategies in their schools. The report also outlines the need…

This document contains a transcript of hearings held to review the year's progress of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), to review budget and personnel reductions, and to evaluate the effect on the OJJDP of the termination of the Law Enforcement Assistance Agency (LEAA). Witnesses testifying included representatives…

To develop and test a theoretical model, based on the Theory of Reasoned Action (Fishbein and Ajzen, 1975), for understanding and predicting the decision to stay in or drop out of school, to identify the specific beliefs that are the basis of that decision, and to evaluate the use of moderator variables (sex, race) to individualize the model,…

School finance reform--traditionally based exclusively on school districts' access to funding--has been made difficult by fiscal retrenchment on one hand and the educational excellence movement on the other. Stating that school districts must consider the use as well as the availability of funds, this paper proposes a new definition of equity that…

A study assessed the effectiveness of various ways of identifying at-risk middle school students for participation in a dropout prevention program. It was considered important to explore factors related to identifying students who were most in need of the program. During the first semester of the project, teacher recommendations, attendance, age,…

This formative evaluation of the Atlantic Street Center's Pre-Teen Bridge Program (P-T Bridge) focused on the academic support and prosocial skill development components of the program. The academic component included one-on-one tutoring, and the prosocial skill component included activities and materials designed to improve social and…

Vocational education has a significant role to play in dropout prevention because studies show a positive correlation between involvement in vocational education and school completion. Students involved in vocational education are more likely to be involved in school-sponsored activities that help them shape goals for themselves and the future.…

Public information campaigns have become a staple of contemporary crime prevention efforts. While formal research on such campaigns has been limited, some important lessons may be learned from evaluation of the national "Take a Bite Out of Crime" or "McGruff" crime prevention campaign initiated in 1979. A large-scale formal…