"Straight A's: Public Education Policy and Progress" is a biweekly newsletter that focuses on education news and events both in Washington, DC and around the country. The following articles are included in this issue: (1) Urban Renewal: New Alliance Research Shows U.S. Urban Economy Will Grow By Billions of Dollars If High School Dropout…

Approximately 28% of students with disabilities do not complete high school (National Longitudinal Transition Study-2, 2005). This increases the likelihood that these students will experience low wages, high rates of incarceration, and limited access to postsecondary education. This article reviews evidence-based secondary transition practices…

Intercultural Development Research Association (IDRA) is an independent, non-profit organization with a vision for schools that work for all children. It partnered with Coca-Cola in 1984 and began a dropout prevention program just as it was conducting the first comprehensive study of school dropouts in Texas. Its annual studies since then have…

The richest nation of the world, the United States still struggles to graduate 50% of its Latina/o high school students. Nominal policy attention on this issue begs the need for bolder and more creative initiatives that call attention to this crisis. States, districts, and schools need to reconfigure this pedagogical crisis by leveraging all…

Introduction: The purpose of this research is to demonstrate that on the perceptions of university students, the student variables are seen as most important than the context variables to dropout their university studies. Method: The used methodology was cross-sectional or of cut, of retrospective type. 558 undergraduates were interviewed by…

The research presented in this paper aims to challenge the belief held by some education professionals that Roma pupils do not value education. The research sample included groups of Roma pupils from two countries (Slovenia and Serbia) and from different socio-economic backgrounds. The results suggest that the majority of the pupils are aware of…

The government of Ghana has designed various initiatives to achieve the Millennium Development Goals on education and the Education for All goals. Despite these initiatives, student outcomes continue to be poorer than desired. Although access to education has improved, student dropout remains a problem and student scores on achievement tests…

The article discusses how a peer group culture in the school setting, embedded in conflicting fields of work and education, co-constructs student disengagement. Disengagement is traditionally linked with dropout and engagement with completion, but the study shows that this relation is not so linear. The data are based on a field study, where the…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of cumulative risk on dropout and treatment outcome in parent training. Participants were 44 families of young children (mean age of 49.59 months) who presented with elevated externalizing behavior problems and developmental delay or borderline developmental delay. All families were offered to…

Research on adolescent well-being has shown that students with depression have an increased risk of facing academic failure, yet few studies have looked at the implications of adolescent depression in the process of school dropout. This study examined mediation processes linking depression symptoms, self-perceived academic competence, and…

The Migrant Education Program (MEP) is authorized under Title I of the "No Child Left Behind Act of 2001" (NCLB). Title I states that the purpose of the MEP is to assist states in efforts to meet the special needs of migrant students. The purpose of this report was to evaluate Houston Independent School District's (HISD) Title I Migrant…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of alternative course delivery methods, which can ultimately help higher education stakeholders make informed decisions for present and future educational endeavors. Emerging systems of educational technology, such as 'networked learning' and the increasing development of online courses…

There has been a wealth of research conducted on the national epidemic of high school dropouts spanning several decades. It is estimated that the class of 2009 cost the nation $335 billion in lost wages, taxes and productivity over their lifetimes (Alliance for Excellent Education, 2009). The citizenry of the country suffers not only because of…

The National Dropout Prevention Center for Students with Disabilities (NDPC-SD) was assigned the task of compiling, analyzing and summarizing the data for Indicator 2--Dropout--from the FFY 2008 Annual Performance Reports (APRs) and the revised State Performance Plans (SPPs), which were submitted to the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP)…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationships between Georgia alternative school administrators' perceptions of student success factors and the three domains of essential elements of effective alternative schools. The success factors included: dropout rate, average grade point average (GPA), average absences per student,…