The Rhode Island 2020 Vision for Education defines an ideal Rhode Island graduate to be "one who is well prepared for postsecondary education, work, and life. He or she can think critically and collaboratively and can act as a creative, self-motivated, culturally competent learner and citizen." The updated Secondary School Regulations,…

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) requires the State to calculate a four-year cohort rate. Utah implemented a federally defined cohort graduation rate in 2008. The graduation rate for the 2017 cohort includes all students who started ninth grade in the 2013-14 school year, plus students who transferred into the Utah public education system…

Schools face the dilemma of transforming both the trend of students dropping out of school and the associated negative socioeconomic outcomes into a positive path of persistence and school completion. Despite ongoing efforts of the federal and state government, as well as those of the local school districts, this problem continues to burden the…

In 2009, the North Dakota legislature passed SB 2217, which lowered the penalty for truancy from a felony to an infraction for a first offense and a class B misdemeanor for a second or subsequent offense. Additionally, the legislature required the North Dakota Department of Public Instruction (DPI) to convene a workgroup to further study truancy…

The "National Dropout Prevention Newsletter" is published quarterly by the National Dropout Prevention Center/Network. This issue contains the following articles: (1) Special Olympics Project UNIFY (Andrea Cahn); (2) The Impact of Project UNIFY; (3) Project UNIFY Brings Youth Together to Learn and Graduate (William H. Hughes); (4)…

This study empirically tested 3 mechanisms commonly suggested to disadvantage youths whose mothers are incarcerated in prison. An event history analysis of school dropout was conducted on a sample of 6,008 adolescents in a large city created by merging several Illinois state administrative data. Findings revealed that adolescents are indeed at…

Schools are often criticized for their role in creating the dropout problem. This article illustrates that with the right resources and approach, educational programs could become sites of transformation rather than reproducers of social inequality. Narrative and thematic analysis of in-depth interviews with graduates of a nationwide program that…

The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) in the U.S. Department of Education (ED) is responsible for enforcing laws prohibiting discrimination in federally assisted educational programs and activities. These laws include "Title IX" of the Education Amendments of 1972 ("Title IX"), which prohibits discrimination based on sex in…

In late 2017, the New Zealand Government introduced a finance policy in which citizens without prior tertiary experience could be eligible for 1 year of tertiary education without fees. The current study was conducted to examine new entrant students' self-reported influence of the Fees-Free Policy on their decision to enrol in university and…

The Migrant Education Program (MEP) is authorized under Title I, Part C of Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) of 2015. Title I, Part C states that the purpose of the MEP is to assist states in their efforts to meet the special needs of migrant students by providing migratory children with the opportunity to meet the same challenging State content…

Background: While spending to prepare precollege students for engineering at universities increases, the number of engineering graduates continues to decrease, and attrition rates for engineering undergraduates remain high. Universities are motivated to understand the factors contributing to low retention of engineering undergraduates.…

Continued discrimination towards, and exclusion of, children with special needs, combined with the high dropout rate of students from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds, creates considerable pressure on the inclusive education (IE) reform initiatives of developing countries. To minimise the challenges to implementing IE reform policies…

The adolescent drug problem places a huge toll on society and a heavy burden on the criminal justice system. Research regarding the benefits of therapeutic community (TC) treatment for adolescents has shown it to be effective. Despite the ability of therapeutic communities to lower drug relapse and reduce criminality, a great deal remains unknown…

This study tested the association between school-wide measures of an authoritative school climate and high school dropout rates in a statewide sample of 315 high schools. Regression models at the school level of analysis used teacher and student measures of disciplinary structure, student support, and academic expectations to predict overall high…

In this one-year qualitative study, the authors examined how border pedagogy is enacted by two Latino/a high school teachers in a border community in Southern California. Through classroom observations, the authors documented powerful student discussions that named complex borders (Giroux, 1992) that existed in their daily lives. We drew from…