Lifelong Learning Project - School Inclusion - Preventing Early School Leaving

Dropouts from School: Issues, Dilemmas, and Solutions

Lois Weis, Eleanor Farrar and Others

SUNY Press

State University of New York, 1989

Book

English

English

The present book deals with the theme of early school leaving focusing on its causes and its possible solutions. The authors collected a selection of essays presenting the problem from the different research traditions. The phenomenon of scholastic drop out is here analyzed in details, with a special care for the biographical background of students. Then it stresses the importance of the role of the larger social and economic environment in which the children set their lives. The first essay reflects upon the effectiveness of school action to prevent the early school leaving problem. Then it differentiates between private and public schools in terms of numbers of dropouts. The second report deals with the correlation between sex (masculine or feminine) and the choice of dropping out, it especially addresses low income women leaving high school before ending their studies. The third chapter reports the results of an empirical study that took place in the United States of America and it focuses on the problems emerging from the dropout issues in the Central Appalachian area. The topic of the fourth chapter is dropping out from Academics and the national Sub-Culture perspective regarding this problem. The next part of the book focuses on the scholastic system and on the elements inside schools that can be seen as explanation factors for the early leaving problem. The last part spreads its perspective and looks at this issue from a wider point of view, that is the world surrounding children at risk of dropping out.

This book addresses the theme of early school leaving from an interesting point of view. It stresses the urgency of this issue and, therefore, realistically refers to the effectiveness of school actions already implemented to solve this problem. Furthermore it deals with this theme using different research approaches, so that the reader can understand the crucial points better and in a more complete way. Each essay has been included in three main topics, which are the main factors to be explained regarding the early school leaving problem. The authors firstly focus on the topic concerned in this book (who are the early leavers), then they widen their perspective looking at the external factors that can be found inside school and society and that can be seen as responsible for the decision of dropping out from school. The general context in which the analysis took place is the American scholastic system, both at lower and academic level: the results obtained, as a point of reference, are to be interpreted as part of a more widespread problem. Lots of societies are facing this problem today: recognizing this fact could be the right starting point for a joint action against early school leaving.

http://books.google.it/books/about/Dropouts_from_School.html?id=MVj9GVEvICAC&redir_esc=y

Sara Ciabattini

Pixel Association

Project Assistant