Each school year, roughly a thousand students drop out of Montgomery County (Maryland) Public Schools (MCPS). However, unlike other large, urban school districts where students who drop out skip school and are suspended often (Balfanz & Byrnes, 2010), students who drop out of MCPS are present in school; they just are not doing well…

Over the past decade, research on dropout prevention has become focused on using evidence-based practice, and data-driven decisions, to mitigate students' dropping out of high school and instead, support and prepare students for career and college. Early warning systems or on-track indicators, in which readily available student-level data are used…

States, districts and schools are now being offered unprecedented opportunities to develop programs that will improve student performance and turn around underperforming schools. An understanding of how reducing chronic early absence helps those efforts will go a long way to assure that innovative school improvement policies and practices will be…

This report paints a collective portrait of the Baltimore City Schools dropouts of 2008-09 to summarize some of the commonalities that join their individual stories together. After examining the surface level demographic characteristics of these dropouts, researchers probed more deeply into their behavioral characteristics in the years preceding…

This paper results from the collaborative work of Research for Better Schools, Inc., with the state staffs of Pennsylvania and Maryland on the problem of students at risk. It highlights the ways in which the problem is being defined, the data sets that are being used to suggest the magnitude of the problem, and the studies that are being used to…

The purpose of this study was to test the relationship between selected factors and voluntary attrition occurring during the freshman year at Montgomery College (Maryland) in the 1969-70 academic year. The study sample was 952 of the 1748 freshmen: 476 students that had voluntarily terminated attendance at college prior to beginning their second…