Creating the Dropout An Institutional and Social History of School Failure

Subjects:

• Sociology » Sociology (General)
• Education » Educational Foundations
• Political Science » Public Policy
• Sociology » Sociology (General)

Related Web Pages:

• Sherman Dorn's Home Page

Reviews:

• In documenting the history of the dropout problem, Dorn tells three related sets of stories. First, this book is a story about rising expectations for schooling and the changing role of the high school over this century from an elite to a 'mass' institution. Second, this book is a story about the creation of a social problem and a social class of people that need to be singled out for special supports and services. And, third, it is a story about the intransigence of school systems and the ways in which schools buffer themselves from real change to response to new problems....The historical sections of this book are excellent and contribute to an inderstanding of how concerns over dropouts have shaped school systems' and society's response. The book also serves as a useful policy history
  —
  Journal of Policy Analysis and Management
• Let me recommend Sherman Dorn's new book, Creating the Dropout. The book understakes a scholarly trek through the rhetoric of school leaving, contruing economic and political vagaries as the occasions for a manufactured problem.
  —Education Policy Analysis Archives

Table of Contents:

• Introduction
• Long-Term Demographic Patterns
• The Changing Mission of High Schools
• Early Attitudes Toward Attrition
• "Social Dynamite"
• The Limits of Dropout Programs
• Omissions
• Dropout Tides
• The Demeaning Dropout Debate
• Sources
• Index