Almost from the start of the public schools system in America, students have been leaving school without high school diplomas. However, the dropout issue did not rise to the level of significance it has today until the early 1980s, when social pressures, along with business leaders, leveraged their influence on educators to address the dropout issue in an attempt to find an acceptable workforce. The business and corporate world began to recognize how America's graduates were poorly prepared for the workplace compared to graduates from other nations. This realization sparked many different initiatives to target the world of school dropouts--including two developmental approaches with implications to the solutions and strategies now used to address school dropouts. One initiative was driven by a group of business leaders to form a national center focused on the dropout crisis. Concurrently, there was a similar initiative to form a national network of practitioners and researchers to address the dropout issue. Both initiatives were birthed almost simultaneously and eventually combined forces to form The National Dropout Prevention Center/Network (the Center), located at Clemson University in South Carolina. From the beginning of the Center, one major mission was to develop a database of model dropout prevention programs. Continued research of this information about models programs along with feedback from practitioners led directly to the 15 Effective Strategies for Dropout Prevention now promoted by the Center and used in many state agencies and school districts across America. The final version of the 15 strategies are examined in this report, bringing the work on the National Dropout Prevention Center (NDPC) to a more scientific level to further promote the effectiveness of the strategies in combating the national dropout crisis.