Chinese parenting emphasises parents' responsibility in training and governing children's appropriate and expected behaviors, including good academic performance. As reflected by the Attendance Ordinance and the strong involvement of parents in children's study, there is continuous emphasis on parental responsibility in children's education in…

Many journal articles provide success stories of initiatives or programs. However, few outline the lessons learned in the building of those programs that may be beneficial to any reader who is interested in duplicating a similar initiative. Thus, the purpose of this article is threefold. The first section will provide the reader with history of…

In this article, the author explores some particularly "luminous" paradoxes that have emerged from qualitative material gathered as part of an ethnographic study carried out over the last five years. The research, now a doctoral study, grew initially out of the author's own contradictory experiences of running learning provision in the English…

Chance, a word used in various languages to refer to "possibility" or "opportunity", is the name that was intentionally chosen for a project which has been running for 11 years in Naples and is aimed at young people aged 15-17 who have dropped out of compulsory schooling. Despite being based on a school structure and located within traditional…

This article presents second year evaluation results from a unique collaboration between a global corporation and a community school system in the southeastern United States. The purpose of the program was to help-at-risk students graduate from high school and develop responsible citizenship while increasing corporate employee retention. This…

This study attempts to answer the following research question: What are the factors that prevent students from completing high school? The participants in this study included 228 current and recent students from General Educational Development (GED) programs across the state of Texas. In an effort to gain a clearer picture of circumstances faced…

Intercultural Development Research Association (IDRA) is an independent, non-profit organization with a vision for schools that work for all children. It partnered with Coca-Cola in 1984 and began a dropout prevention program just as it was conducting the first comprehensive study of school dropouts in Texas. Its annual studies since then have…

What causes students to leave school? According to Azzam (2007), over 47% of students in the United States who drop out of school reported they did so because school was boring and irrelevant to their life situation. What can schools and teachers do to encourage students to stay in school? One possible solution may be to look at experiential…

Despite the 150 years of British colonial governance in Hong Kong, Chinese collectivist culture continues to be a dominant source of influence in the learning context of students (Cheng, 1998; Salili, Lai and Leung, 2004; Tao and Hong, 2000), placing a great emphasis on education and effort (Salili and Lai, 2003). Education is viewed as the…

The transition from high school to adult life is an exciting time for many young people. Youth from high poverty backgrounds, however, are considered at-risk for a host of unfavorable outcomes including academic failure, school dropout, drug abuse, unemployment and incarceration. These adolescents are more likely than their more affluent peers to…

The experience that will be described in this paper is based on work carried out during the Chance Project, an experimental programme designed to re-integrate teenage drop-outs from difficult areas of the inner city into mainstream school. The Project, which has been running in Naples, southern Italy, since 1998, comprises three school centres…

The reasons why students stay away from school are varied and complex. They are even more complicated in countries where conflict and warfare make the educational and social environments more treacherous and unpredictable for young people and adults. This article examines the conditions surrounding school attendance in Israel, the Palestinian…

School dropout is a complex social problem. In 1999, more boys (15 %) than girls (9 %) dropped out of Canadian schools prior to graduation (Bowlby and McMullen, 2002). In the United States, Kaufman et al. (2000) evaluated that 5 % more boys than girls dropped out of school. This literature review focuses on the place given to gender within studies…

In the United Kingdom the educational phase that exists between compulsory school (for ages 5-16) and universities is dominated and controlled by the Learning and Skills Council (LSC). This body was established in late 2000 as a state funded quasi-governmental educational agency. This small scale qualitative study of educational provision in the…

Education for All (an international movement of governments, non-governmental organizations, civil society and the media) set objectives in Jomtien (1990) and reaffirmed in Dakar (2000) that, among other things, work towards all children having access to free, compulsory, good quality primary education by 2015. School dropout may hinder the…