School

Truancy is defined as being absent from school without permission. The education of adults and the presence of a school in the community have a significant impact on school attendance. According to UNICEF and World Bank policy research, females and the poor in Niger, Egypt, Morocco, India, and Pakistan are disadvantaged in their opportunity for education. India has a 17 percentage point difference between the school enrollment of girls and boys from the ages of six to fourteen. In Benin, the enrollment rate for boys is 63 percent higher than girls aged six to fourteen. In Colombia, the enrollment rate is 98 percent higher than that of girls (Filmer 1999). Morocco has 538,000 child laborers in the country, and most of these children are under fifteen years old and follow the tradition of working in the fields. Tens of thousands of these children are sold as domestic servants in the cities. More than half of the child laborers in Morocco are female. News reports suggest that the government is trying to return children to the classroom (BBC News 1999).

The World Declaration on Education for All (1990), issued in Thailand, affirmed a commitment to universal primary education. Access to education is seen as a prerequisite for progress in developing countries and in the reduction of poverty everywhere. However, more children are working rather than learning. As described by Clare Short, Secretary of State for International Development, "one hundred and thirty million children around the world do not or cannot go to school" (BBC News 1999).

The combination of low school enrollments and a lack of access to quality education restricts progress towards improved literacy in developing countries. Programs such as the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative—launched in 1996 by UNICEF—have begun to establish comprehensive poverty reduction strategies geared toward the creation of conditions for economic development and universal access to education and basic social services (UNICEF 1999).

In comparison, in the United States, school for some students has no intrinsic value, and it has no connection to the larger social context within which students live. In some classrooms, students are not provided with the opportunity to use personal experiences as a context for applying knowledge. The education movement of the 1990s valued the premise that "all students can learn." But many teachers failed to believe in this philosophy of education. There is often a lack of understanding about different cultures and the lives of students outside the classroom.

Nearly half of black children in the United States are poor, and more than one-third of Hispanic children live in poverty. Minority group students have higher drop-out rates regardless of socioeconomic status (Steinberg; Blinde; and Chan 1984). There appears to be a strong association between race and ethnicity and the likelihood of dropping out of school. What has become increasingly clear to education professionals is that children have multiple needs.

The United States, Norway, and Canada, among other countries, have begun to examine more closely the cost of traditional programs that only address truancy and dropouts by imposing laws and standards. Educators and health and social service providers are forming new partnerships to help improve the lives of children, youth, families, and communities (Adler and Gardner 1994). Educational leaders are also increasingly aware of the connection between a child's success in school and individual and family empowerment. Some nations have realized that it makes better sense to develop programs that focus on retaining youth in school rather than dealing with the costs later.

A key objective in school improvement efforts is raising the levels of achievement of underperforming groups of students. Increasingly, educators are realizing that the factors that put children at risk are varied and cumulative. Canadian and American critics point out that schools and human service agencies cannot work in isolation. Schools alone cannot solve the multiple needs of at-risk children. Critics of the American educational system conclude that traditional approaches pervasive in educational policy and children's services have resulted in fragmented responses doomed to fail. To address the need for integration of services, collaborative community programs are being developed.