Understanding Why Students Drop Out of High School, According to Their Own Reports

Jonathan Jacob Doll,Lynne Walters,Zohreh Eslami

doi:10.1177/2158244013503834

Jonathan Jacob Doll, Lynne Walters + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244013503834

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Abstract

Research on school dropout extends from early 20th-century pioneers until now, marking trends of causes and prevention. However, specific dropout causes reported by students from several nationally representative studies have never been examined together, which, if done, could lead to a better understanding of the dropout problem. Push, pull, and falling out factors provide a framework for understanding dropouts. Push factors include school-consequence on attendance or discipline. Pull factors include out-of-school enticements like jobs and family. Finally, falling out factors refer to disengagement in students not caused by school or outside pulling factors. Since 1966, most nationally representative studies depicted pull factors as ranking the highest. Also, administrators in one study corroborated pull out factors for younger dropouts, not older ones, while most recent research cites push factors as highest overall. One rationale for this change is a response to rising standards from No Child Left Behind (NCLB), which can be ultimately tested only by future dropout research.

Highlights

The cause of a student dropping out is often termed as the antecedent of dropout because it refers to the pivotal event which leads to dropout
The dropout problem has persisted through these changes even amid higher rates of school completion; it is still found in alarming rates in many culturally and linguistically diverse groups, including African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and immigrants (Rumberger & Larson, 1998; Rumberger & Thomas, 2000; Valenzuela, 1999)
This problem has earned much scholarship, no previous publication has addressed dropout perceptions in terms of all the nationally representative studies on dropout. These refer to studies done at the federal level, and often using sample sizes of tens of thousands of students. As interesting as it may be, many of these nationally representative studies were named in Rumberger and Lim’s (2008) extensive review of empirical dropout research conducted from 1983 onward; but to date, the dropout antecedents of these studies have not been collected in one volume and analyzed together

Summary

Introduction

The cause of a student dropping out is often termed as the antecedent of dropout because it refers to the pivotal event which leads to dropout. Never before have reports of students who dropped out been compared from all the available nationally representative dropout studies and analyzed. What follows will describe seven nationally representative studies on school dropout and their findings. These studies will be analyzed using the framework of push, pull, and falling out factors, as set forth by Jordan, Lara, and McPartland (1994) and Watt and Roessingh (1994), to determine which types of factors were most prominent. The discussion section will posit potential reasons for predominant types of factors, and the implications this has on dropout scholarship in the past, present, and future

Background

Summary of Nationally Representative Studies

Findings

Discussion

Conclusion