Rural school districts face unique challenges in procuring funds, recruiting staff, and obtaining high-quality technical assistance. This environment creates problems in identifying high-quality instructional materials and implementing best practices. A collaborative learning network can address these challenges by providing access to professional…

University earth science departments seeking to establish meaningful geoscience outreach programs often pursue large-scale, grant-funded programs. Although this type of outreach is highly successful, it is also extremely costly, and grant funding can be difficult to secure. Here, we present the Geoscience Education Outreach Program (GEOP), a…

This study looks at the impact of a cost-effective professional development model in which teaching artists helped early elementary teachers master arts-based strategies for boosting the oral language development of English-language learners (ELLs). Teaching artists visited K-2 classrooms for 50 minutes weekly for 28 weeks. Student scores on the…

Over the past several decades, researchers, politicians, and corporate leaders have focused reform efforts on the size of educational contexts. Hundreds of billions of public and private dollars have been invested to reduce the size and scope of both classrooms and schools (Lee & Ready, 2007). Unlike many education reforms, these downsizing…

This handbook for child care centers that are expanding their support to parents of children in their programs begins by describing the Parent Services Project (PSP). The next section explains the many services available to parents and the variety of ways these services are provided at the PSP centers. Services include fun family events; parenting…

A two-phase attendance alert intervention system was field tested within the fifth grades of two elementary schools, the tenth grades of two high schools, and within grades nine through twelve in a continuation high school. The schools, in four different Los Angeles County unified school districts, vary by socioeconomic patterns and school system…

The importance of cooperative development among and exchange between university information systems is discussed. Cooperative developments in the California State University and Colleges System and exchange efforts between university systems in other states are described. (Author/BH)

The Culver City (Calif.) Schools' Spanish Immersion Program (SIP) offers an innovative and highly successful approach to the development of proficiency in a foreign language in the elementary grades. This approach differs from most bilingual programs in that for the first two years the students are completely immersed in Spanish. When the students…

The Demonstration Programs in Reading and Mathematics were initiated in California in an effort to improve the reading and mathematics performance of secondary school students from neighborhoods characterized by high poverty levels, transiency, and low test scores. The programs have operated in California schools for the past 11 years. Each…