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Policy Challenges Webinar: Bridging Research and Practice
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| Dr. Jay Smink, Clemson University |
Reducing high school dropout rates is among the most pressing issues facing educators today. About 407,000 U.S. students dropped out of school between October 2005 and October 2006, enough to fill nearly 9,700 school buses.
This webinar brought together Dr. Jay Smink, Director of the National Dropout Prevention Center/Network at Clemson University, with state education officials, school superintendents, high school principals, teachers, and other educators from New Hampshire, which has undertaken an initiative to reduce its high school dropout rate to zero by 2012. Dr. Smink presented six research-based recommendations for lowering dropout rates from the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) Practice Guide on Dropout Prevention, which he coauthored. He also discussed how the recommendations can move the six principles highlighted in “New Hampshire’s Vision for Redesign: Moving from High Schools to Learning Communities” into practice. Dr. Smink further shared information about 15 effective strategies for raising high school graduation rates and some of the evidence-based programs that address risk factors and conditions. He highlighted a “crosswalk” document that analyzes how the six Practice Guide recommendations, 15 implementation strategies, and six principles of the New Hampshire Vision are aligned.
Additional speakers included Paul Leather, director of the Career Technology and Adult Learning Division at the New Hampshire Department of Education; Mark Dynarksi, vice president of Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., who explained the rigorous research process that informs IES Practice Guides; and Kathy Dunne, REL-NEI’s New Hampshire State Liaison. Leather is leading the state’s efforts at dropout prevention.
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