What factors at school or at home most contribute to truancy and drop outs in your community?

In a community where there is a large population of Asian and Mexican families I think that cultural differences play large roll in drop out rates.  Not all students should be pushed to seek higher education (college).  It is just plain rediculous to think that this nation needs to be inhabited by nothing but college grads.  Where will our service workers come from.  Students who don't have a chance (nor the desire) to make it in college are feeling like failures and therefore becoming behavior problems and/or dropping out because they just can't get it.  We need to stop lying to these kids and telling them that they can be anything they want to be when they grow up.  That is NOT true for every child. 

I agree that not all students should be college bound.  What happened to the days when we had trade schools for students?  If we had manufacturing and automotive trade classes in middle and high schools, then internships to follow in high school and in the junior colleges, these students would have a place to go.  I believe many of them would be much happier.  Lots of these students are very kinesthetic and have a much easier time with the trades.  If those are the paths that they would choose for themselves and they will be more successful, why not allow it.  We try to fit all kids into a "one size fits all" mold that other countries do not do.  If we want to compare ourselves to other countries, look at what they really do.  They decide the path the student will follow very early on and the family has very litttle choice.  In our country, we value our personal freedoms too much for that.

 We have a school across the street that helps kids get some trade education, but it still doesn't give them the internship in the trades that we used to have. I agree that our students NEED to have options other than book learning. I work in an inner city school where more than half of the kids have to work to help pay for the family housing & meals. There is so much pressure to survive, much less excel in school. 

Giving them options that are attainable and mean a REAL job at the end of high school would be so unbelievably AWESOME for them! Instead of choosing college for them when they don't have enough $$ for food is ridiculous. Give them an attainable goal with a real world end in sight that puts $$ in their pockets. :)

Start solving the problem in elementary school.  I teach 5th grade in NYC.  Some of these children should NOT be in the grade.  They are behind in reading and math.  The New York State exams are not preventing social promotion. Kids miraculously pass in summer school. We should holdover more students in grade 2 if they are not yet on grade level.  This business of promoting children who are not yet meeting standard is setting them up for failure.  Furthermore, they should be evaluated to make sure there is no learning problem. Alternative methods of teaching should be utilized, not just another year of the same thing.  The school where I teach does not even offer AIS (remdial) services.

As an inclusion educator and the parent of a child with learning disabilities I can clearly see that these are the children who are not graduating.  My son is 19 and barely a junior in high school because his learning needs are ignored in the classroom.  He has an IEP that is given lots of yes yes yes from teachers who then don't follow the plan.  The only way he would get the services he needs to succeed is if I go to school with him as his one on one aide.  As m;uch as I would like to do this, I have 2 kids in college and need to work and provide income to my household.  In my inclusion classroom I am able to employ many teaching methods including PT, OT and Speech activities because my employer(a private Christian school) has chosen to provide extensive training in these methods.  We believe that all children deserve the opportunity to develop their brains to the highest level possible. 

Until we begin to educate teachers to teach children of different abilities in the same classroom our education system will continur to fail.  My mother fought for these methods 40 years ago for my brother and we are still fighting the same battle today.  Expectations and classroom populations have changed but the way we educate teachers have not.  We cannot expect teachers to provide quality knowledge to all the different learners in a classroom if they do not receive the training they need for inclusion.  Every teacher now needs to be a Special Education Teacher. 

Students are passionate about learning but most teachers are teaching to a test instead of teaching skills they can use for life to have them ready for the world. My son is a senior in high school and the past two years he taken more test than I did when I was his age.