This article reports on an English for academic purposes course designed following the tenets of content and language integrated learning (CLIL) to address the needs of language minority (LM) high school graduates entering Canadian universities. The language used in and required of post-secondary study is challenging for many LM students,…

Evaluating special education teachers is an especially salient topic for secondary principals because special educators in middle and high schools often collaborate with numerous content-area teachers and have varying degrees of direct instructional impact. The author's experiences as a secondary special educator and as a supervisor responsible…

Project Literacy United States (PLUS) is a national service project initiated in December 1985 with the key goals of mobilizing and organizing community resources to deal with illiteracy on a local level and to raise awareness of the widespread illiteracy problem. Using concepts from the Navy's intensive reading immersion program, Memphis-Project…

Tests of academic progress such as those enforced by No Child Left Behind Act are the only practical way to hold schools accountable for educating all children and are therefore essential to the twin aims of quality and fairness. Many of the complaints against the No Child Left Behind law pertain to the supposedly harmful influence of intensive…

Teachers at Woodlawn Middle School in Long Grove, Illinois are no different than most. They were discouraged by the amount of testing taking place in their classrooms, frustrated with not having the kind of data they needed, and feeling overwhelmed by the data they did have. The teachers wanted to make better schoolwide instructional decisions,…

The Memphis-Project Literacy U.S. (M-PLUS) coalition tried the reading immersion concept with a defined target audience in the workplace. Fifty-six employees of the Defense Depot and the City of Memphis (Tennessee) were admitted to the program based on test scores of between 2.0 and 7.0 grade levels on the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test. The…