On his book Dropping Out: Why Students Drop Out of High School and What Can Be Done About It
Cover Interview of December 01, 2011
The wide angle
The book is related to and draws on a wide range of theories and research in education and related social science fields, including economics, sociology, demography, political science, and criminology. Many fields provide valuable insights into the four dimensions of the dropout crisis. Economists, for example, have documented the economic flight of high school graduates, including their poor labor market experiences and low lifetime earnings. Economists have also compared the benefits of improving high school graduation rates with the costs of proven interventions, demonstrating the economic payoff to such investments. Criminologists have examined the relationship between dropping out and crime, trying to determine the extent to which crime leads to dropping out and dropping out leads to crime.
This book is a culmination of 30 years of research on high school dropouts. I wrote my first paper on high school dropouts in 1981. And although I have investigated other educational issues over the course of my academic career, including student mobility, school segregation, and education of English language learners, research on dropouts has been dominant.
Most of this work has come in the form of empirical studies and academic papers. But more recently my work has focused on interventions and policy prescriptions. I started the California Dropout Research Project (CDRP) in December 2006 to synthesize existing research and undertake new research to inform policymakers and the larger public about the nature of—and effective solutions to—the dropout problem in California. To date, the project has produced 69 research studies and publications which have been downloaded more than 64,000 times from the project website and lead to a series of bills designed to address the dropout problem, which were passed by the California legislature and signed into law by the governor.
But I decided to write this book also in order to provide a comprehensive summary of the issues and research on the topic that could inform a wide audience with an interest in the problem, including scholars, educators, and policymakers.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
The wide angle
The book is related to and draws on a wide range of theories and research in education and related social science fields, including economics, sociology, demography, political science, and criminology. Many fields provide valuable insights into the four dimensions of the dropout crisis. Economists, for example, have documented the economic flight of high school graduates, including their poor labor market experiences and low lifetime earnings. Economists have also compared the benefits of improving high school graduation rates with the costs of proven interventions, demonstrating the economic payoff to such investments. Criminologists have examined the relationship between dropping out and crime, trying to determine the extent to which crime leads to dropping out and dropping out leads to crime.
This book is a culmination of 30 years of research on high school dropouts. I wrote my first paper on high school dropouts in 1981. And although I have investigated other educational issues over the course of my academic career, including student mobility, school segregation, and education of English language learners, research on dropouts has been dominant.
Most of this work has come in the form of empirical studies and academic papers. But more recently my work has focused on interventions and policy prescriptions. I started the California Dropout Research Project (CDRP) in December 2006 to synthesize existing research and undertake new research to inform policymakers and the larger public about the nature of—and effective solutions to—the dropout problem in California. To date, the project has produced 69 research studies and publications which have been downloaded more than 64,000 times from the project website and lead to a series of bills designed to address the dropout problem, which were passed by the California legislature and signed into law by the governor.
But I decided to write this book also in order to provide a comprehensive summary of the issues and research on the topic that could inform a wide audience with an interest in the problem, including scholars, educators, and policymakers.