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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Low high school completion rates are an ongoing challenge for educators. This study provides the results of an evaluation of a ninth-grade summer transition program offered at a large public school with a high freshman dropout rate. The evaluation consisted of preprogram and postprogram surveys and interviews with 64 incoming freshman…

To date, people with intersex variations have been mainly studied via small-scale clinical research, with only a small amount of reflective commentary contributed by sociocultural scholars. This paper reports on findings from a 2015 online Australian survey of 272 people with intersex variations, which aimed to redress the gap in research on this…

Despite the growth of its popularity in recent years, online learning has demonstrated high dropout rates compared to dropout rates in traditional face-to-face courses. Prior research attributes attrition to the physical isolation of students from one another and the lack of interaction between and among them--factors which foster feelings of…

September 30th 2016 was Botswana's 50th birthday. Botswana, a deeply impoverished country in 1966 was on that day an upper-middle income country in the world rankings. Its education expenditure was one of the highest in the world, at around 9% of the GDP. It was on record to have provided more than 90% of universal and free primary education.…