Every community has individuals or groups who manage to find better solutions to problems than their peers, although everyone has access to the same resources and challenges. Those are the positive deviants.

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…

Communities face powerful challenges--a high-school dropout epidemic, youth unemployment, teen pregnancy--that require powerful solutions. In a climate of increasingly constrained resources, those solutions must help communities to achieve more with less. A new kind of community collaborative--an approach that aspires to significant,…

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…

This annual report presents information on projects funded with monies from the Elementary Secondary Education Act, Title IV-C, that may help project directors, evaluators, and potential IV-C proposal writers in the management, evaluation, and writing of IV-C programs. Evaluation of each IV-C project was completed by the appointed evaluators…