This is a topic that hit close to home for me because I am a high school special education teacher in a Title 1 school district. I see my students disengage from school and drop out, often never attaining a GED or returning to complete their high school education.

Defining the Dropout Rate

The US Dept of Education’s Center for Education Statistics defines three categories of dropouts: event rates, status rates and cohort rates. Event rates are comprised of the percentage of students within a single year who drop out of their high school program without completion. Status rates reflect the percentage of students within an age range (typically ages 16 – 24) who have dropped out or are not enrolled in a high school program within a given year. Cohort rates are comprised of the total percentage of a specific group of students who have dropped out of school within a given year. The research I primarily relied upon used status rates for their data and calculations.

For the purposes of this paper, the dropout rate will be defined as: students between the ages of 16 and 24 who have not received a high school diploma or who are not enrolled in a high school education program.

Reasons Students Drop out of High School

The Council for Exceptional Children (CEC) conducted research on the reasons students drop out of school and determined, based on surveys of dropouts, that the number one reason given by those individuals for dropping out of school was uninteresting classes. The second most prominent reason given by the individuals for dropping out of school was becoming disillusioned with school because of their associations with peers who were unengaged with the educational process. Other reasons found by the CEC for students dropping out of school include real life events such as pregnancy, the need to gain full-time employment to support their family and illness. Another prominent reason for students dropping out of school is the fact that they were on the failure track with their grades and felt there was no recovering. Based upon analysis of their findings and data, the CEC identified two other prominent reasons students drop out of school: student disengagement and lack of or low parental involvement in the education of their children.

Suggestions for Preventing Students from Dropping Out

I noticed one over-lapping theme to all of the suggesting for fixing the student dropout rate: Engage, Engage, Engage. To engage students in the content they are to learn enough to get them to want to stay in school, schools must consider if their curriculum is engaging and meeting the student at the level he/she is at. Another way to engage students is through the educators developing relationships with the students – either taking an interest in the student’s athletics, play and/or coursework. Parental involvement and community support is also improtant in preventing students from dropping out of school. If the parents and community put faith and support into the educational system and make a culture of learning, the student will be less likely to drop out.