This report provides a brief overview of key component's of Austin Independent School District's federal Title I, Part A program for 2015-2016, including funding, student and teacher demographics, student academic performance, and accountability.

According to the Alliance for Excellent Education (AEE), nationally one-third of students, 1.3 million each year, fail to graduate. The AEE suggests that these low rates have for too long been "obscured... by inadequate accountability systems at state and federal levels." Montana's accountability system is a case in point. Dependent on…

The American College Testing Program (ACT) reported that approximately 48% of students who enroll in college depart after their first year. Nontraditional students have a higher departure rate than traditional students. One such nontraditional group of students consists of female spouses of military personnel. These spouses are frequently involved…

This qualitative phenomenological study of the life experiences of seven rural gifted individuals who dropped out of school investigated whether they shared commonalities that might have led to the phenomenon of dropping out. The problem was that no one had asked them to share their stories prior to this study. By searching for meaning in their…

While MOOCS have emerged as a new form of open online education around the world, research is stilling lagging behind to come up with a sound theoretical basis that can cover the impact of socio-economic background variables, ICT competences, prior experiences and lifelong learning profile, variance in intentions, environmental influences, outcome…

This study examined the dropout trajectories of racial and linguistic minority students and explored the effects of students' contextual factors on their high school dropout risks. Our motivation was to identify the dropout patterns of Black, Hispanic, and Hispanic English language learner (ELL) students, who have comparatively high dropout rates,…

Theoretical models designed to predict whether students will persist or not have been valuable tools for retention efforts relative to the creation of services in academic and student affairs. Some of the early models attempted to explain and measure factors in the "college dropout process." For example, in his seminal work, Tinto…

The District conducts two kinds of dropout analyses every year in Miami-Dade County Public Schools. The "cross-sectional" analysis of student dropouts examines dropout rates among students enrolled in various grades at one point in time. A "longitudinal" analysis, also conducted annually, tracks a group of students in the same…

Relatively little is known about the pathways youth with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) take in the transition to adulthood in terms of employment and postsecondary education. Applying life course sequence analysis to a nationally representative sample of youth with ASDs (n = 120), this study clustered various longitudinal sequences into three…

The Optional Flexible School Day Program (OFSDP) is approved by the Texas Commissioner of Education and is offered by the Houston Independent School District (HISD) to provide students with flexible school hours and days of attendance. The goal of the program is to improve the graduation rates for students who are in danger of dropping out of…

Decades of research show that high school dropouts are more likely than graduates to commit crimes, abuse drugs and alcohol, have children out of wedlock, earn low wages, be unemployed, and suffer from poor health. The ChalleNGe program, currently operating in 27 states, is a residential program coupled with post-residential mentoring that seeks…

This paper deals with the question in what ways teachers and course designers can support the development and exertion of learner autonomy among online university students. It advocates that a greater attention to learner autonomy could help more students to complete their course successfully and thus contribute the decrease of the high dropout…

In Canada, adolescent boys have been shown to have a higher high school dropout rate compared to girls. This situation is particularly evident in the country's second largest province by population, Quebec. The sport of Canadian football has recently gained in popularity in Quebec as many people believe that the sport can be used to promote both…

This paper brings together some data on student retention in distance education in the form of graduation rates at a sample of distance institutions. The paper suggests that there is a "distance education deficit" with many distance institutions having less than one-quarter of the graduation rates of conventional institutions. It looks…

Background: There is evidence that learners may adopt different kinds of achievement goals: mastery approach, mastery avoidance, performance approach, and performance avoidance. In higher education, this evidence has mainly come from young people who have recently gone straight from secondary education to higher education. However, higher…