It’s rare for researchers to test a promising treatment on only a portion of students in real schools to see if it’s effective. Educators typically loathe the idea of denying anyone an opportunity to learn, which is what happens in a randomized controlled trial. Even rarer in education is a replication of this kind of […]
The Dropout Problem
Graduation rates at U.S. high schools have hovered around 70 percent for decades. But many urban and rural areas routinely graduate only 40 or 50 percent of their students. The dropout crisis in many cities is acute, with 2,000 high schools producing half of the nation’s dropouts. Cutting the dropout rate and turning around “dropout factories” are among the Obama administration’s priorities. But what strategies work? In collaboration with the Washington Monthly, we looked at how New York City, Philadelphia and Portland, Ore., have fared in their attempts to cut dropout rates.
