To address the dropout crisis requires a better understanding of why students drop out. Although dropouts themselves report a variety of reasons for leaving school, these reasons do not reveal the underlying causes, especially multiple factors in elementary or middle school that may influence students' attitudes, behaviors, and performance in high school prior to dropping out. To better understand the underlying causes behind students' decisions for dropping out, this study reviewed the past 25 years of research on dropouts. The review is based on 203 published studies that analyzed a variety of national, state, and local data to identify statistically significant predictors of high school dropout and graduation. Although in any particular study it is difficult to demonstrate a causal relationship between any single factor and the decision to quit school, a large number of studies with similar findings does suggest a strong connection. The research review identified two types of factors that predict whether students drop out or graduate from high school: factors associated with individual characteristics of students, and factors associated with the institutional characteristics of their families, schools, and communities.
Authors: Rumberger, R., Lim, S. (University of California, Santa Barbara)

To address the dropout crisis requires a better understanding of why students drop out. Although dropouts themselves report a variety of reasons for leaving school, these reasons do not reveal the underlying causes, especially multiple factors in elementary or middle school that may influence students' attitudes, behaviors, and performance in high school prior to dropping out. To better understand the underlying causes behind students' decisions for dropping out, this study reviewed the past 25 years of research on dropouts. The review is based on 203 published studies that analyzed a variety of national, state, and local data to identify statistically significant predictors of high school dropout and graduation. Although in any particular study it is difficult to demonstrate a causal relationship between any single factor and the decision to quit school, a large number of studies with similar findings does suggest a strong connection. The research review identified two types of factors that predict whether students drop out or graduate from high school: factors associated with individual characteristics of students, and factors associated with the institutional characteristics of their families, schools, and communities.
Authors: Rumberger, R., Lim, S. (University of California, Santa Barbara)

Recognizing that no tool is more important than information to help educators and other advocates improve the country's educational system, the College Board and the Alliance for Excellent Education have formed a partnership to develop a series of fact sheets highlighting the state of American schools and their students. The third in a multi-issue series provides a "Facts for Education Advocates" feature focusing on the demographics and racial divide in today's schools.

This report is the result of a study of existing education finance policy and programming in the state of Michigan. Research was conducted in the spring and summer of 2008 by the NYEC with funding from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation. In focusing on how Michigan state policies affect the financing of education options, NYEC seeks to enable and encourage Michigan and its communities to develop policies that facilitate the creation of viable education options and multiple pathways to a high school diploma for struggling students at risk of dropping out and for those who have already left school. The report offers specific recommendations for improving the policy climate for the expansion of education options, describing policies and initiatives in other states that Michigan might consider. 

• Allow dollars to follow students to their schools
• Integrate resource decisions with instructional plans; measure and analyze results of different expenditures
• Actively support continuous student improvement
• Define and fund a research and development agenda that expands what we know about effective resource use
• Make resource use and academic achievement central to financial reporting practices, and use funding contingencies to create fair and meaningful accountability

The report was produced by the School Finance Redesign Project (SFRP), with funding by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The authors of this publication assert that traditional systems of assessing student performance help to produce school failure and commonly-used hundred-year old structural mechanisms have, in fact, become powerful barriers to academic achievement. To counteract these systems, the authors create the Youth Women's Leadership Charter School, a public charter high school serving low-income and minority young women in inner-city Chicago, and they describe their school's new model of teaching and assessment.

This experience-based report explores the ways that standardized instructional time, semester grading, and Carnegie units influence many students to underperform and prevent failing students from getting back on track to meeting rigorous standards for graduation. The new assessment system based upon individual student mastery consistently produced higher levels of learning, high school graduation, and college attendance at the charter school. This is a provocative primer for other school reformers. - By Camille Farrington and Margaret Small, Washington, DC: American Youth Policy Forum, September 25, 2008