School Dropouts: Education Could Play a Stronger Role in Identifying and Disseminating Promising Prevention Strategies
General Accounting Office
February 1, 2002
The General Accounting Office (GAO) is at it again, this time with a report on dropout prevention efforts. I should declare my view that the only sure form of dropout prevention is for schools to be high performing and effective places that students are not tempted to abandon. As GAO notes, "[D]ropping out of school is a long-term process of disengagement that occurs over time and begins in the earliest grades." But they didn't get very far in saying what to do about this. GAO admits that "the total federal funding used for dropout prevention activities or [sic] their impact on reducing dropouts is not known." This leads to the unhelpful recommendation that the Department of Education should do a better job of distilling the research, evaluating its programs and disseminating its findings more broadly. Yawn. Should you wish to bother anyway, you can find it at http://www.gao.gov/docdblite/summary.php?recflag=&accno=A02619&rptno=GAO-02-240.
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