A United Nations report released earlier this week revealed that 20 percent of teenagers in Latin American countries between the ages of 11 and 18 do not attend schools.

The Economic Commission For Latin America and the Caribbean and the United Nations Children's Fund co-published the Adolescents: The Right to Education and Future Well-being study that was released Monday with the purpose of drawing attention to problems in Latin American education systems and propose equality-oriented policies.

According to the report that used household surveys from 18 Latin American countries, nearly all 11 years olds are enrolled in schools but at after exiting primary school and upon entering the secondary school cycle, problems with gender and social inequality occur.

By the time those 11 year olds reach the age of 17, half of them have already dropped out and only one in every three teens complete secondary school without having to repeat a grade.

Daniela Trucco, the social affairs officer for ECLAC's Social Development Division and a co-author of the study, said in an email to the Latin Post that secondary school is not a mandatory requirement in many Latin American counties and some of those countries have only just started to make attendance mandatory.

She said the lack of mandatory attendance is one factor as to why most teens choose to drop out while another reason is that many families live in rural areas but the majority of secondary schools are in the city. The distance between the two poses an economic dilemma for those rural families that would need to travel far to get their child to school.

However, Trucco added that the main reason teenagers are dropping out is because of the economic need to help out their families, as the study found that 24 percent of males and 26 percent of females dropped out because of economic reasons.

"At this age, adolescents can start contributing more to the economic sustention of their families," Trucco said. "But this same reason affects differently male adolescents than females. Male adolescents tend to insert in the labor market, whereas females are usually delegated to support unpaid domestic labor."

Teenagers who dropped out cited a "lack of interest" in school, which Trucco said is probably a reflection of the current education system that needs to figure out a way of inspiring adolescents and retaining students.

"Some countries still need to work on the basics, provide access," Trucco said. "But all of them need to address quality issues that affect social segregation."

The study found that 24 percent of males and 16 percent of females had no interest in attending school.

Central American countries such as Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua have seen the highest rates of teenage dropouts, Trucco said.

She also said that it varies from country to country in terms of drop out rates based on gender, but for many adolescent girls, teen pregnancies are still widespread in Latin American countries, which prevent them from attending classes.

Countries with a higher percentage of indigenous populations tend to have more male adolescents drop out of school while the countries with the highest drop out rates such as Central American countries and Bolivia tend to see more female teens drop out, she said.

According to the most recent data reports by the U.S. Institute of Education Sciences' National Center for Education Statistics, the drop out rate of 16 through 24 year olds in 2011 was 7.1 percent, the lowest figure the data center has recorded in the last half century.

Much like Latin America, lower income families in the U.S. also experience higher drop out rates with their teens. In 2011, 13 percent of students from low-income families dropped out while only 4.8 percent of students from middle-high-income families and 2.3 percent of students from high-income families dropped out, according to one set of IES data.

The states that saw the highest drop out rate of its high schools -- 9th through 12th grades -- in 2010 were Arizona with 7.8 percent, Washington, D.C. with 7 percent and Mississippi with 7.4 percent, according to an alternate set of data.

The states that saw the highest drop out rate of its Hispanics students in high school were Arizona with 8.1 percent, Colorado with 9.9 percent and Washington, D.C. with 8.3 percent.

The drop out rate among the Hispanic community between 16 and 24 years old continue to decrease but they still experienced the highest drop out rates consistently compared to white and black communities, according to a set of statistics.

In 2011, the Hispanic community had a drop out rate of 13.6 percent, while the black community saw 7.3 percent and whites saw only a 5 percent drop out rate.

Across the board, more male teens drop out than females do. Within the Hispanic community the same holds true as 12.4 of Hispanic females dropped out of school between 16 and 24 years old while 14.6 percent of the males dropped out.

On average, female adolescents complete more years of schooling in most countries, not just in Latin America, Trucco said, but the labor market continues to have a history of sexism and gender inequality as the women receive less pay and less protection from workers' rights.

"Girls -- in other parts of the world -- tend to do better than boys in the language area and worse in math," she said. "They tend to follow career paths in the social sciences and boys in the scientific and mathematical areas, which get better paid later. Those are things that need to be addressed in a more profound reform that involves curriculum and teachers' preparation."