Whether rural or urban, children of poverty often live on islands of cultural and economic isolation far from the world of school, books, and learning. To help them span that gap, they need bridges built from innovative plans, with whatever tools can be found, by any and all who will help. (SI)

The 2008 Leaders Emerging Issues Program brought together a bipartisan group of state legislative leaders with experts in education and public policy to explore potential solutions to the nation's dropout crisis. Participants explored the basic elements of a comprehensive education system that meets the needs of all students, especially those at…

This guide is intended to be useful to educators in high schools and middle schools, to superintendents and school boards, and to state policymakers in planning and executing dropout prevention strategies. The target audience includes school administrators as well as district-level administrators, seeking to help develop practice and policy…

Each year, more than 8,200 young Philadelphians drop out of school. The first step to a solution, taken in 2005, was the gathering and examination of data to truly understand the dimensions of the problem and the characteristics of struggling students and out-of-school Philadelphia youth. These studies, conducted by researchers at the University…

Dropping out of school before high school graduation has re-emerged as a priority issue for professional and public debate and concern. Dropping out of school is viewed as a gradual process as the bond between student and school weakens, representing the final step that occurs after opportunities for intervention at earlier stages have been…

After four years of operation, the Title VIII program of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act has been instrumental in reducing the number of school dropouts in target schools by 52 percent. This report describes in detail some of the successful educational practices operating within target schools in Alabama, California, Colorado,…

Describes a program developed to help would-be dropouts at the junior and senior high school level. Two important components of the program are that staff work with no more than two students at a time and that staff members volunteer to take part in the program. (MD)

The purpose of this article is to review a partnership between a teacher education department and a dropout prevention program. The partnership developed from a variety of communities' needs, no less of which was that of reconnecting marginalized youth at a local dropout prevention school with their community through cultural and civic…

The Stay In--You Win project of Alberta, Canada is designed to harness the resources of the school, community, and parents in support of the student staying in school and completing a high school diploma. It is an approach dependent upon partnerships and teamwork. It is an approach based on research findings from around the world, programs that…

Module Two of the Alberta project "Stay In--You Win" is presented in this document. The stated objectives of this module are: to provide the facts of dropping out; to examine the educational, social, and economic consequences of dropping out; to explore the reasons why early school leavers decide to drop out and to provide a profile of…

Module Three of the Alberta project "Stay In--You Win" is presented in this document. This module provides for an integrated strategy involving community, parents, students, and teachers. A collaborative team planning approach is used to maximize the "buy-in" of all teachers. The stated objectives of the module are to introduce…

Module Four of the Alberta project "Stay In--You Win" is presented in this document. This module is designed to generate ideas for planning effective initiatives for schools. The stated objectives of this module are to provide a listing of dropout prevention programs in Alberta high schools; to encourage interpersonal networking among…

This paper examines available information on early identification of students at risk of prematurely dropping out of school. Many factors such as drug use, lowered educational achievement, delinquency, and unemployment appear to be consequences of dropping out, yet cause and effect is often difficult to define. A variety of school related,…

The State-funded Attendance Improvement/Dropout Prevention program and the City-funded Dropout Prevention Program distributed over $30 million to the New York City Board of Education in 1985-86. This document is a summary report of an analysis of program implementation in the schools receiving these funds aimed at better understanding of political…

This report presents results of an extensive study undertaken to determine the factors contributing to the high dropout rate in the Los Angeles Unified School District, to review options offered to students, and to make recommendations for addressing the dropout problem. First, a list of the 27 people who formed the study committee is provided. A…