dropout recovery
Obama's intentions are good, but just saying "No Dropouts" isn't enough
Those involved in the fight to raise the nation’s woeful dropout rate have been waiting a long time for a president to elevate the issue to a level commensurate with the threat this epidemic poses to our nation’s future.
So it was pleasing to hear President Barack Obama say in his third State of the Union address that our nation must commit to ensuring that more students “walk the stage to get their diploma.”
But the president's prescriptive advice — not allowing students to “walk away from their education” by having every state require all students stay in high school until they graduate or turn 18 — demonstrated a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem at hand.
Put simply: The act of dropping out isn’t about age – it’s about options.
In our work serving dropouts in partnership with more than 50 school districts across the United States, the teachers, mentors and advocates of The American Academy’s NoDropouts program see young men and women who left school because they become parents, become sick, need to earn full-time wages or are scared of bullies and gangs.
These problems have nothing to do with how old they are.
Fusion Academy helping dropouts revive their dreams
Dazmon Taylor was bullied, threatened, intimidated and ostracized.
"I couldn't handle it," Taylor told The Detroit News, "so I just stopped going to school altogether."
Game time: USC makes a play for at-risk students
USC has been tackling a huge problem.
And no, we're not talking about University of Oregon running back LaMichael James (who managed just 78 yards against the Trojans during USC's 38-35 upset over the Ducks last month.)
This problem's even bigger. Even stronger. And if you don't get ahold of it right away, it will slip away faster than James ever could.
Online learning isn't failing — online programs are. And it's time for a change.
Half of online students wind up leaving their virtual schools within a year of enrolling. Online schools produce three times as many dropouts as they do graduates. Millions of dollars are going to virtual schools for students who are no longer attending classes.
Those are the hard facts in a scathing account of the state of Colorado’s virtual school industry from the I-News Network investigative journalism consortium and the nonprofit Education News Colorado. The report concluded that the “churn” of students in and out of online schools is drawing tremendous resources away from public schools, which are often left holding the bag when virtual schools fail to meet students’ needs and expectations.
Let’s be honest and let’s be clear: These problems are not confined to the Centennial State. It’s reasonable to expect that similar investigative efforts in other states will produce similarly blistering results.
Community colleges: Reaching higher by reaching beyond higher education
Junior colleges are no longer simple institutions of higher education.
Today, these schools are repositories of education at every level — from basic literacy and GED preparation to trade training and criminal repatriation, said Michele Vaughn, associate dean for community education at the College of Lake County in Grayslake, Ill.
GOP candidates miss opportunities to address dropout crisis
Conservative scholars and candidates have continually missed opportunities to offer constructive low-cost solutions to the high school dropout epidemic, James Marshall Crotty reports for Forbes.com.
This was especially true at last night’s GOP presidential debate on the economy and jobs at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, where a review of the transcript reveals that the words “education,” “dropouts” and “learning” were not mentioned once.
Inglewood Unified School District realizes a double advantage — by re-checking its dropout numbers
The Inglewood Unified School District had a problem.
More than a quarter of the Southern California school district’s high school students had dropped out, according to district records.
It’s never too late to return to school, but opportunities are limited
Leslie Hudson dropped out of high school as a teenager.
Today Hudson has children of her own — and she doesn’t want them to make the same mistakes she did.
So she decided to set a good example: Last month, she graduated from the Career Training Center at Goodwill Industries in Niceville, Florida.
Former dropouts love our online learning program — but we can do even better

From teachers to technical support, American Academy students gave their online program high marks when surveyed by Washington State’s Digital Learning Department.
The recently released survey results show that nearly nine out of every 10 members of The American Academy’s student body — mostly dropouts and other studentsat risk of dropping out — report being satisfied with the program.
The siren's song of the GED
Fifteen teams of school officials in Wellston, Mo., spent the weekend canvasing the homes of former students who have dropped out of school, KSDK News reports.
At one home, Superintendent Stanton Lawrence had a conversation with the mother of one of his district's dropouts.
"Well, actually, he's decided to go through a GED program," she told him.
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