Dropout Prevention

This guide is intended to be useful to educators in high schools and middle schools, to superintendents and school boards, and to state policymakers in planning and executing dropout prevention strategies. The target audience includes school administrators as well as district-level administrators. This guide seeks to help them develop practice and policy alternatives for implementation. The guide includes specific recommendations and indicates the quality of the evidence that supports these recommendations. In addition, we have provided a description of some ways each recommendation could be carried out. Our examples should not be construed as the best or most effective ways to carry out each recommendation. Rather, the examples illustrate practices that were noted by previously implemented dropout prevention programs as having had an impact on staying in school, progressing in school, or completing school. Readers need to note that the specific ways in which the practices were implemented varied widely based on each school’s context.