Despite requirements of and support for universal education up to grade 9, there are concerning reports that poor rural areas in China suffer from high and maybe even rising dropout rates. Although aggregated statistics from the Ministry of Education show almost universal compliance with the 9-year compulsory education law, there have been few…

There is little research on differential reading performance in multilingual contexts in less than ideal learning conditions. This article reports on a reading intervention project in a poor multilingual primary school in South Africa where reading levels in Northern Sotho (home language) and English (language of schooling) were initially very low…

This study estimates the individual and combined effects of selected family, student and school characteristics on the academic achievement of poor, urban primary-school students in the Turkish context. Participants of the study consisted of 719 sixth, seventh, and eighth grade primary-school students from 23 schools in inner and outer city…