At the national and international level, early school leaving is associated with Italy's lack of growth capacity and social mobility deficit. In this light, school could be deemed to be the origin of such problems. But it can also become a positive response to them. A diagnosis of said phenomenon is proposed in the first part of this paper, where national socio-economic factors are associated with a general lack of competence. In the second part, the attention is focused on strategies and didactic rethinking aimed at preventing and combating school dropouts. The guidelines provided by the Ministry of Education to combat early school leaving highlight three lines of action: perseverance and effectiveness of action over the time, coordination between policy promoters and evaluation of results; skill-based approach and personalized learning; alliance between school, territory, family and educational agencies. The article theorizes that rethinking of some aspects of teaching and school organization are qualifying in preventing and combating early school leaving. Furthermore if on the one hand it is essential to encourage and develop initiative skills in the single schools as well as improve the regional role of school offices, it is also paramount to create a Coordination Office at national level with the task to implement the synergies between the various players and set up a stable and organic system that would positively impact on the quality of teaching.