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High School Dropout Prevention
Defining Dropout | Early Warning Signs | Dropout Prevention Strategies | Dropout Prevention for Students with Special Needs | Research on this Topic 
Far too many high school students drop out of school long before graduation day. The National High School Center will provide a variety of valuable resources in the area of dropout prevention. A relatively strong research base exists for student dropout prevention, and when it comes to these types of high school interventions, researchers know a great deal about what works. The National High School Center will help bridge those research-based findings with real-life practice in schools.
Early Warning Signs
Approaches to Dropout Prevention: Heeding Early Warning Signs With Appropriate Interventions
This report outlines steps that schools can take to identify at-risk students and provide the necessary support systems and relevant interventions to assist students in obtaining a high school diploma. Further, the report discusses the use of early warning data systems to target interventions for groups and individual students, offers a variety of best practice approaches undertaken by higher-performing high schools, and presents effective programs that are currently being implemented to stem the dropout problem.
Developing Early Warning Systems to Identify Potential High School Dropouts
The following two resources are intended to support educators at all levels of the public school system in building data systems that identify probable high school dropouts before they leave school.
- Developing Early Warning Systems to Identify Potential High School Dropouts [Early Warning System Guide]
This guide discusses the factors that help predict the probability that individual students will eventually drop out of high school prior to graduating and includes step-by-step instructions for building an early warning system. - Early Warning System Tool (Excel file)
This tool allows educators to input student-level data and automatically calculate whether individual students are on track to graduate or at risk of dropping out.
Preventing Delinquency by Promoting Academic Success
This Webinar presented by Jessica Heppen and Mindee O’Cummings, of the National High School Center provided practical strategies to help identify students who are at increased risk of school failure and dropout, as well as strategies to support students in meeting academic requirements and maintaining academic success. The presenters provided an overview of early warning systems to identify potential high school dropouts along with best practices in research-based preventive interventions. (June 2008)
Panel Discussion on Dropout Prevention
This panel presentation from the National High School Center's 2007 Summer Institute takes an in-depth look at the dropout problem affecting all states across the nation. Panelists outline the problem and causes that contribute to the high number of dropouts and discussed innovative and effective solutions that are working to reduce the number of students who do not graduate from high school in the United States.
Identifying Potential Dropouts: Key Lessons for Building an Early Warning Data System
This report, prepared by Achieve, Inc. for the project Staying the Course: High Standards and Improved Graduation Rates, pushes for states and districts to build longitudinal data systems to track student progress and engagement in the hopes of identifying potential dropouts and at-risk students early enough for successful intervention.
The Silent Epidemic: Perspectives of High School Dropouts
This report, produced by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, surveys young dropouts aged 16-25 from around the country to better understand and contextualize the circumstances that led these young people to drop out of high school. Student perspectives are integrated with data synthesized from other studies and papers to meld individual student insight with macro-level research.
Unfulfilled Promise: The Dimensions and Characteristics of Philadelphia's Dropout Crisis, 2000-2005
This comprehensive research report by Ruth Curran Neild and Robert Balfanz of the Center for Social Organization of Schools at the Johns Hopkins University, analyzes data from the Kids Integrated Data System (KIDS), housed at Cartographic Modeling Lab of the University of Pennsylvania, and provides a detailed picture of when and why Philadelphia’s young people drop out of high school. The study contains both crosssectional and cohort analyses, and is the first to provide analyses of school and social service records.
