The findings of a task force study of New York City's implementation of a State dropout prevention law are provided in this report. An introduction describes briefly the historical background of the legislation, called the Attendance Improvement-Dropout Prevention program, which provided $28 million in supplemental funds to school districts with poor attendance rates. The introduction also outlines the study's purpose and organization. Five chapters follow, each addressing a different aspect of the legislation's implementation in New York City, which received 80% of the available funds. Chapter 1 discusses the political context in which the legislation emerged. An analysis of the explicit provisions of the legislation is presented in Chapter 2. Chapter 3 presents a chronology of the various intergovernmental actions which were required to bring the policy to the doorstep of implementation. Chapter 4 details the efforts of five community school districts to plan and implement programs. It pays special attention to the political and organizational characteristics of those districts, as well as the attitudes of the school personnel which circumscribed program selection and implementation. In Chapter 5 the findings of the various parts of the study are summarized and the conclusions of the earlier sections are related to each other. An appendix contains a description of the methodology used in the study. (KH)