Presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association
New York City, March 25, 2008
Division G, Section 4: Framing Dropouts Revisited
Judy Radigan
Rice University
jradigan@rice.edu
Abstract
Seventeen years after Fine’s landmark study (1991), Framing Dropouts, this study of potential school leavers finds Latinos and African Americans in an urban high school continuing to live complex lives that collide with school policies. This eight-year, ethnographic study in an urban Texas school followed three-year ninth grade students caught in a push-out trap that brought high test scores to the school and a 60% dropout rate (McNeil, Coppola, Radigan, Vasquez-Heilig, 2008). In 2004, the study includes a four-month student research project on dropouts that facilitated the founding of a charter school for returning school leavers and concludes in the charter school. Data was drawn from classroom observations and interviews with students, teachers, and parents. Field notes and transcribed audiotapes of the classroom observations and interviews were combined into thick records. Analysis of the iterative acts in this urban high school and its city revealed the power that high-stakes testing and NCLB have over schools and the control through which the nation, state, city, district and school administrations attempt to manipulate democratic action within the school and its community.
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