Between national and state budget cuts in education and an ever increasing push toward the English Only movement, a rise in dropout rates for Hispanic students is imminent. National data show the percentage of Hispanic students who drop out of high school to be nearly 60% in some states including Michigan, South Dakota, West Virginia, Alabama,…

This article features Worcester (MA) Technical High School, a school that has achieved significant gains in Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) scores. The school opened as Worcester Boys' Trade High School on February 9, 1910, with 52 student ironworkers and woodworkers attending on weekdays and Saturday mornings--the beginning…

In the state of Texas, whose standardized, high-stakes test-based accountability system became the model for the nation's most comprehensive federal education policy, more than 135,000 youth are lost from the state's high schools every year. Dropout rates are highest for African American and Latino youth, more than 60% for the students we…

Open online courses (OOC) with a massive number of students have represented an important development for online education in the past years. A course on artificial intelligence, CS221, at the University of Stanford was offered in the fall of 2011 free and online which attracted 160,000 registered students. It was one of three offered as an…

An increasing number of urban districts are scrapping traditional high school grade structures, changing their retention policies, and devising more flexible routes toward graduation to address high dropout rates. Educators in Baltimore, Boston, Houston and Rochester, New York say they are particularly focused on the 9th grade, a year when many…