In the united states today, an alarming amount of high school students drop out of school every year. Each student has their own individual reasons for dropping out, but what are the contributing factors to these reasons? What pushes them over the edge? The Bill and Melinda gates foundation collected survey data through focus groups in a project in 2006 that aimed to discover some of the factors, which push students out of schools. The objective of their project was to, “paint a more in-depth picture of whom these young people are, why they dropped out of high school, and what might have helped them complete their high school education. We wanted to give their stories and insights a voice, and to offer our own views on next steps, in the hope that this report could be a further wake-up call to educators, policymakers, other leaders, and the public to summon the national will to address the high school dropout epidemic.”

Rather than producing a spreadsheet of data, through this method they compiled their data into a series of different answer categories. They provide percentages within the different responses but other than that, the data is not number based. Interestingly enough, 47% of students said that they dropped out of school because they simply were uninterested in the classes being taught. Another factor of interest was parent involvement. There were a section of questions devoted to the parent’s involvement in the student’s academic lives both while they were thriving in school and when they were struggling. They discovered that only 59% of students said that their parents were involved in their education. 68% of Students whose parents weren’t involved in their education said that only when their parents discovered that their child was on the verge of leaving school did they become involved. They addressed other factors in this study as well from the students from attendance records, to teacher effectives and collective motivation. Overall 74% of students said that if they could go back and change it that would have graduated high school. Most importantly, this study shows us the personal side to the struggle of making through high school which many students face each year. It shows us that even though the majority of them do have large life and carrier aspirations, circumstances in their lives and inadequate responses to those circumstances has led to them dropping out.

This is a very well put together study, which addresses the topic of dropping out from an individual perspective. Rather than collecting the numbers, they instead make this study more about the students and their feelings about what caused them personally to leave school before graduation. Though this study does a good job of hearing the students perspective, it leaves a large hole in the demographic and environmental factors that also most likely played a roll in their failure to complete school.

http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED513444.pdf