ABSTRACT
If politicians could see inside the walls of our middle and high schools across America, they would be so alarmed that immediately they would make education the top national priority. In the large inner-city schools, politicians would see a majority of students who are so weak in basic skills that they cannot write a complete sentence, cannot spell correctly half the words they write, cannot read above a third grade level, and do not know that one-half is 50 percent. For these reasons in part, one-third of our nation’s students drop out before completing high school (Bridgeland et al., 2006).
