“Show you can make it” What are the profiles of students that do not drop out during Grades 12-13?

Abstract

Nowadays, school failure is considered a priority in the European education policy agenda. While in average Europe dropout rate is 15.3%, in Italy it is 23.5% (OECD, 2010b) and it mostly involves immigrant and lower social class students. In spite of the official efforts, Italian high school system has failed in removing the obstacles to academic success for all students: within vocational courses the dropout rate is 100% higher than in other high schools. That means that certain students are predestined to reach lower school and job positions in the society.
In this paper I describe the findings of an empirical research carried out during the school year 2009/2010 in three cities of North, North-West and South of Italy. The research is based on theoretical sampling typical of grounded theory method and involved six different high schools. From the findings emerge
three types of students’ resistance to dropout.