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What Your Community Can Do To End Its Drop-Out Crisis

Practical Guide Proposes Three Steps


If you are ready to tackle - and end - the high school dropout crisis in your community, you need to take three steps, writes Robert Balfanz at the Center for Social Organization of Schools, Johns Hopkins University.

In a short, practical guide, What Your Community Can Do To End Its Drop-Out Crisis: Learnings from Research and Practice (May 2007), Balfanz provides twenty questions that will help you:

  1. Understand your community's dropout crisis and the resources it is currently devoting to ending it

  2. Develop a strategic dropout prevention, intervention, and recovery plan that focuses community resources, efforts, and reforms at key points when students fall off the path to high school graduation

  3. Gather the human and financial resources need for a comprehensive and sustained campaign, and develop the evaluation, accountability, and continuous improvement mechanisms to maintain it.

Read What Your Community Can Do To End Its Drop-Out Crisis (PDF, 29 pp) at the Graduation Gap Web area of the Center for Social Organization of Schools Web site.