Also read: education, education gap, civil rights, studies, AT&T

When President Barack Obama said, "Dropping out of high school ... is not just quitting on yourself, it's quitting on your country," he was well aware of the nation's alarmingly high dropout rate.

And that rate continues to climb. Last year, 16 percent of all public high-school students left the system, up from 9.3 percent in 2006 (a 6.7 percent increase). (Source: U.S. Department of Education)

What's driving this trend? If you ask educators and students, you'll get vastly different opinions, new research commissioned by AT&T (No. 2 on The DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity^® list) has found.

The survey, conducted by Civic Enterprises and Peter Hart Research, polled 603 high-school teachers and 169 high-school principals whose schools consistently experience dropouts. The results were then combined with a different nationwide survey, also conducted by the same researchers, of 467 racially and ethnically diverse high-school dropouts.

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Key findings from the students:

 77 percent of the high-school-dropout respondents said they left because they weren't challenged enough and because teachers had low expectations of them

 Nearly half of the dropout students said they would have remained in school if they had been challenged more or if they weren't bored with school

Key findings from the educators:

 42 percent of teachers surveyed said students who cited boredom as a cause for dropping out were simply "making up excuses"

Less than one-third of teachers sampled said that "schools should expect all students to meet high academic standards, graduate with the skills to do college-level work and provide extra support to struggling students to help them meet those standards"

"This expectations gap between students and teachers--which our research shows is very real--may be one of the most important barriers to closing the achievement gap," John Bridgeland, president & CEO of Civic Enterprises, said in a press-release statement. "Research has shown the importance of high expectations in boosting student achievement.

Who's to blame?

According to the study, teachers say students are dropping out not because of unchallenging schools and educators but because of a lack of parental involvement. Some 61 percent of teachers and 45 percent of principals surveyed said uninvolved parents led to the dropouts and led to students not being challenged enough in "most (dropout) cases."

Other factors causing high-school dropout rates:

 Nearly half of all teachers surveyed said students who had jobs to support their families and students with children of their own were more likely to drop out than graduate

 About 50 percent of teachers said students drop out because they spend too much time with peers who aren't interested in school, they've missed too many days of school to catch up on missed work or they weren't properly prepared for high school by their grammar schools

What are the solutions?

Here's what teachers and school administrators suggest:

 Create smaller class sizes, which allows for greater individualized attention for struggling students

 Build better early-warning systems for struggling students

 Develop strategies to better engage parents

  Have rigorous alternate-learning opportunities (such as hands-on learning)

 Provide more college-level courses

 Connect classroom learning with real-world experiences

Click here to read the entire study.

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