Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Turner, Kenneth Roland

Titel

Why some public high schools are more successful in preventing dropout: The critical role of school size

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

Erscheinungsjahr

1991

Link zum Volltext

• ProQuest

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This thesis is an empirical investigation of factors related to student dropout. It addresses the question: Which school characteristics help explain the variation in dropout rates among comprehensive public high schools? Using hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) to re-analyze large-scale nationally representative data on White, Hispanic, and Black students and schools, this study examines the linkage between two phenomena: the decisions that educators make about how to structure high schools and the decisions that students make to drop out. This study finds that, after adjusting for the background characteristics of students and their classmates, students tend to drop out less from schools that have fewer enrolled students, more collegial staff relations, and less directive principal leadership. Moreover, while there is a tendency for schools that display these characteristics to have a positive effect on all students, their salutary effect is greatest upon minority students. While the largest school effects found were associated with student enrollment, cooperation, and principals' leadership, this study determined that to a lesser degree dropout is also related to tracking and teacher collaboration. Students tend to drop out less when schools rely less on tracking and when teachers spend more minutes each week collaborating on matters related to instruction. The academic expectations that teachers held of students was not found to be an important predictor of dropout. In three respects the average make-up of students attending a school was found to affect the dropout rate for individuals within a school: (a) when the socio-economic status of students attending a school is higher, dropout tends to be lower; (b) when the students who attend a school are more academically prepared, dropout tends to be lower; and (c) when the students in a school are more frequently in trouble with the law, suspended, or tardy, dropout appears to be greater. The findings from this study suggest that changes in the organization of high schools will have the most benefit for those who need them most, namely youngsters of color and accent, those who typically are least well-served by the system of public education in this country.