DR1 Daily News - Dominican Republic

A new report by the Dominican Initiative for Quality Education (IDEC) reveals a sobering reality that more than half of enrolled teenagers drop out of the nation’s public school system.

Analyzing a cohort of 162,000 students from the 2016-2017 and 2018-2019 academic cycles over an eight-year period, researchers found that approximately 52,000 students had been out of the classroom for more than two consecutive years, for a 52.9% dropout rate, as reported in Listin Diario.

The findings, presented to faculty at the Universidad Iberoamericana (Unibe), highlight that the crisis is most acute in urban areas and among specific demographics.

Demographic disparities and geographic hotspotsThe IDEC report underscores significant gaps in retention based on nationality and gender. The dropout rate for Haitian nationals stands at 49.7%, nearly 18 percentage points higher than the...