School Dropouts and their Reasons for Leaving School: the Case of Selected Public Secondary Schools in the Division of Calamba City

Abstract

INTRODUCTION

Education is the main source of opportunity to become active member of the society from the social and individual perspectives. From the social perspective, the key to a continuous development of the society is education. On the other hand, from the individual point of view, education determines the opportunities of every individual to be socially active. When the individual drops out from school, his/her opportunities become limited. Dropping out from school is a danger to the youths' life and places them in great problems as stated by Tarusha 2014. The Dropout Reduction Program (DORP) had a clear vision that all schools must be geared toward significantly reducing, if not eradicate the number of dropouts. However, the recent data from the performance indicator of public secondary schools in the Division of Calamba indicate that the simple dropout rate increased by more than double from 1.38% in SY 2013 -2014 to 3.09% in 2014-2015.

METHODS

The study utilized the mixed-method with questionnaire as the main data-gathering instrument coupled with in-depth interview and focus-group discussion (FGD). For the in-depth analysis of data, frequency, and percentage were used. Participants were drawn from the target schools purposively chosen to represent the Division of Calamba City. The consideration in choosing these schools was made based on the report of dropout rates in the Division of Calamba City. Pareto analysis was also employed to determine the schools which exhibited relatively high rates of dropouts for the last three school years. The empirical data collected were treated statistically using descriptive statistical procedures. To further validate the result of the survey, thematic approach was used in in-depth interview and FGD

RESULTS

This study revealed that the age bracket of dropouts is from 12-15 years old, majority are males, from Grade 7 whose parents finished high school and with a monthly family income of 5,000php to 10,000ph. From the perceived factors contributing to dropping out, family problem (domestic factor) lack of interest (individual factor), peer influence (school factor) and lack of financial source (poverty factor) were predominant. With regards to the process and intervention given to students prior to dropping out, teachers carried out various activities like home visitations and calling the attention of the parents. On the part of the parents, they normally responded to the calls of the school or teachers by means of going to school and talk about the issue concerning their child. After dropping out, the teacher again will conduct another home visitation and sometimes will not do anything about it anymore. On the part of the parents, after their child dropped out from school, they will convince their child to go back to school. With regards to the interventions and conference with parents (student-respondents' perception); home visitation (parent-respondents' perception) and counselling (teacher-respondents' perception) were considered helpful in convincing the dropouts to return to school.

DISCUSSIONS

With the presence of various contributory factors that led students to drop out from school, an appropriate action plan or intervention should be a priority. Schools must develop a system-wide plan that will allow monitoring and evaluation of activities where problems and issues could be addressed; where linkages with all stakeholders could be sustained; and where feedback mechanism is possible and tracking of progress is viable.