The FOCUS program provided career counseling and job placement assistance to pregnant or parenting teens and young adults as well as young females who are at high risk of an early pregnancy. The goals of the program were to (1) increase economic self-sufficiency among adolescent and young adult women, thereby reducing welfare dependency and…

Chicago Public Schools, spending more than its $1.5 billion a year budget, has defined its first obligation as producing graduates who can read well. This study assesses how well the school system is succeeding by examining roughly 39,500 students who were ninth graders in fall 1980 and should have graduated in spring 1984. Statistics were used to…

Students of ninth-grade age in Austin, Texas, were studied to discover how desegregation affected dropout rates for Blacks, Hispanics, and Anglo/Others. Examination of the gross dropout percentages over the first 15 months suggests that impacted-only (nonreassigned, but in impacted schools) minority students were twice as likely to drop out as…

Findings from research on student retention and adult education participation can guide educators in improving the persistence of adult students. In order to increase student persistence, programs and teachers should: address real needs; create a supportive learning environment; minimize problems and barriers; communicate accurately; and monitor…

A research study examined the extent and impact of one-year enrollments by 12th graders in 2-year secondary vocational programs in New Hampshire. Enrollment data from 1981-1982 and 1982-1983 school years from six rural Regional Centers were used for the sample. A review of current literature found that no other state has ever researched the…

This report of the second phase of a study of the geographic mobility patterns of postsecondary occupational education graduates in New York State provides a further examination of reasons for the mobility of program completers, verifies the general magnitude of the identified mobility trends, and examines the occupational status of program…

One traditional difficulty with dropout research has been finding a reliable base of information relative to dropouts. The High School and Beyond data base provides a unique opportunity to explore issues related to dropping out. This study used data from the High School and Beyond 1980 base-year survey, the second follow-up survey in 1984, and the…

Reported are aspects of the Home-Oriented Preschool Education (HOPE) Program, notably the extensive follow-up study of the program. Contents focus on the history of the HOPE Program, the summative evaluation of HOPE, the preliminary phase of the follow-up study, the study's main phase, measurement procedures used, and the third, fourth, and final…

This report describes results of Project TEEN, a 1-year federal grant project awarded to the Louisiana State Department of Education for the purpose of conducting a state assessment of compliance with Title IX as related to middle and secondary school dropouts among pregnant female adolescents. Other stated purposes of the project include…

Correlates of the teacher scales from the Effective School Battery (ESB) were examined in the Charleston County School District (CCSD) in South Carolina. Focus was on determining the relations between the ESB teacher scales and student academic achievement, progress through the grades, attendance, and dropout. This study was conducted as part of a…

The digest presents recent statistics regarding educational services for handicapped children, including data on who is being served, how that population is changing, and what trends are affecting special education today. The report answers the following questions: how are handicapped children defined for purposes of the Education for All…

In 1983, the Des Moines (Iowa) Schools applied for approval to use the allowable growth funding provided in Senate File 2168 to expand and create additional programs for the prevention of dropping out as well as programs for students who had dropped out but were returning to school. The original proposal included the following: (1) an expansion of…

Good teachers leave teaching not because pay is low but because of poor working conditions and too little recognition. Since students can be strongly affected by teachers, teachers who feel negatively about themselves can adversely affect students. A five-evening workshop was developed in Dade County, Florida to boost teachers' self-esteem and to…

Middle College, a high school program on the LaGuardia Community College campus, was designed to reduce the urban dropout rate, to prepare students more effectively for work or college, and to attract more students to higher education. As a public alternative high school on a college campus, the program creates a continuum between high school and…

A situation has existed in the specialized high schools of New York City in which criteria for admission (the admissions test and the summer program) have been applied without any systematic determination of their validity: data from the present study suggest a more rational educational approach. (Author/JM)