Education Week

In the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains here in the northwest corner of South Carolina, high schools’ attempts to curb student dropouts may not match what many people picture when they hear talk of the nation’s “dropout factories.” Yet one-fifth of the 2,000 high schools nationwide categorized that way by researchers at Johns Hopkins University are in rural areas, some of them small schools where students get a lot of personal attention.

With 50 such schools, South Carolina tops all other states in the number of rural schools on the dropout-factory list, with Georgia and North Carolina not far behind. Nearly half of those South Carolina schools have fewer than 500 students.

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