The author of this article was a teacher, who had taught high school English for seven years. Then she was a researcher, observing and interviewing, recording and reflecting. One incident, stretching over four class periods, took her back across that divide between teacher and researcher, and touched her personally. She was trying to understand…

A recent study of ninth- and tenth-grade dropouts in North Carolina shows that Hispanic adolescents have the highest early dropout rate among the state's largest ethnic groups. This relationship persists when boys and girls are analyzed separately: Hispanic boys are more likely to drop out early than other boys are, and Hispanic girls are more…