The number of students choosing to drop out of school before earning their high school diploma continues to rise at alarming numbers. These students cause educators to question what strategies can assist struggling learners with academic, behavioral, or health issues to increase their chances of completing high school. Many dropout prevention…

Attempts to understand the patterns behind student disengagement and early school leaving have traditionally focussed on early school leavers' individual characteristics. More recently, however, studies have begun to focus on the extent to which early school leaving is shaped by school-level factors, and in particular the central role of teachers…

Alternative schools are vital spaces for students who are not successful in traditional schools. The knowledge of social and emotional learning (SEL) and the impact it has on students who attend alternative schools specifically is limited. The problem addressed by this study was the lack of success that explicit SEL programs have in meeting the…

Educators develop and implement various academic/behavioral intervention programs designed to specifically address academic shortcomings or aimed at disrupting behavioral cycles that impede success in the classroom. The purpose of this research was to identify gaps in behavioral Response to Intervention (RtI) programs and to design a RtI program…

Each year approximately 1.3 million students dropout of high school and an estimated 40% of minority students do not graduate on time (Roybal, Thornton, & Usinger, 2014). In high school, 22% of students repeat 9th-grade classes because students fail to make a smooth transition. This gives the 9th-grade the highest enrollment rate and the…

Since the last decade of the twentieth century, school systems have confronted the dialectic between those increasingly widespread policies primarily aimed at increasing productivity and efficiency and other policies focussed on equity and educational and social inclusion. In this inherently contradictory scenario, in order to improve their…

This study investigates the change in students' cognitive engagement as a result of participation in a Flexible Learning Programme. Using an understanding of engagement as both a process and a relationship between the students and their school, we sought to determine whether students' perception of competency, willingness to engage, and…

In this paper, the authors examine how a charter high school in a large upper-Midwest city is successfully serving students who have not succeeded in the traditional school system and are in danger of experiencing the school-to-prison pipeline. The school accomplishes this through its enactment of five key qualities: (1) a casual, family-like…

In the last 20 years, Early School Leaving (ESL) in Portugal has registered a significant decrease. In order to understand the reasons for this trend towards improvement, this paper conducts an analysis of anti-ESL measures implemented in diverse educational institutions. The main objective is to understand how mainstream and alternative education…

What leads young people to disengage and leave school early? This paper focuses on young adults' educational trajectories, with the objective of identifying useful insights for improving school measures and strategies against early school leaving and school disengagement. Specifically, it draws upon an empirical study with young adults from the…

Each year, 20% of U.S. students drop out of high school (Balfanz, Bridgeland, Bruce, & Fox, 2013). There is an abundance of research on student behaviors from researchers who explored the process of student disengagement from school (Bowers, Sprott, & Taff, 2013; Lessard, Butler-Kisber, Fortin, Marcotte, Potvin, & Royer, 2008), however…

This study explores how two schools serve students who are in danger of or have already experienced the school-to-prison pipeline. The majority of students at these schools faced significant setbacks in traditional settings (e.g., truancy, poor grades, suspension, expulsion, incarceration). At each charter school, the free and reduced lunch…

After being identified as a school in need of improvement, one struggling inner city high school implemented an evening school alternative program to reduce their suspension, failure, and dropout rates. In its first year, the program graduated 100% of the student participants, all of whom were in danger of dropping out, or being kicked out of high…

Leaving school without graduating presents a significant challenge for young people and for society as a whole. One way communities and school systems are responding to this challenge is with coordinated efforts to re-engage young people in ways that make it more likely for them to earn a diploma. Re-engagement efforts vary across the country but…

This report presents the State Compensatory Education (SCE) report for the 201-2019 school year. Per Section 29.081 of the Texas Education Code (TEC §29.081), the SCE program is designed to reduce dropout rates and increase academic performance of students identified as being at-risk of dropping out of school. SCE operates as a funding source to…