“…Indeed, the life course perspective posits that the school is the main influence on these students (rather than family or outside influences), and this is supported here by the significant negative impact of the student-teacher ratio variable in the slopes part of the model for the Low-Increasing students. Additionally, while we can only make a tentative claim at this point, it may be that the Low-Increasing students are also the students most affected by the well studied problematic transition from grade 8 to grade 9 (Allensworth & Easton, 2007;Belcher & Hatley, 1994;Benner & Graham, 2009;Bowers, 2010b;Rumberger, 1995;Zvoch, 2006), since they begin with the lowest average grades of the different trajectories. In contrast, in-line with the hypothesis that the Mid-Decreasing students are the "unexpected" dropouts that past dropout identification methods have failed to identify early as at risk of dropping out, a significant portion of the variance in the intercepts (20%) is explained by the background variables.…”