History of IDEA
Jeannie Oakes, Founder and Former Director
Youth Voice in School Finance
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Without Dollars and Sense Powerpoint
Past Educational Opportunity Reports
Solving the nation's dropout crisis
- 10-26-2011
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Commentary by Russell W. Rumberger/Education Week
Russell W. Rumberger is the vice provost for education partnerships at the University of California’s office of the president and a professor of education at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
The United States is facing a dropout crisis. Only 76 percent of public high school students earn a diploma within four years of entering the 9th grade, a rate lower than 40 years earlier. The United States ranks 21st among industrialized countries in the proportion of youths who complete high school. We will never achieve President Barack Obama’s goal of having the highest proportion of college graduates in the world without solving our dropout crisis. Just as the dropout crisis is not new, neither are attempts to solve it. In 1963, President John F. Kennedy initiated a national campaign to increase publicity about the problem and to help local school districts in identifying and helping potential dropouts. In 1990, the nation’s governors adopted six national education goals for the year 2000, including a high school graduation rate of 90 percent. (more...)
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