Public administrators can play a vital role in the articulation of demands emerging from the community and can serve to advance these demands by their position of authority, skills and knowledge to help facilitate the development of programs and projects to address public needs. This article describes the role that a small Master of Public…

This paper asks the question: Is now the right time to consider a statewide policy initiative to support increased access for Massachusetts community college students to paid internships that can help them improve their employment and earnings trajectory? Is this something that employers, colleges, and state leaders would see as a welcome…

This case study describes the Enough Abuse Campaign, a multidisciplinary, statewide effort to prevent child sexual abuse in Massachusetts. The study uses the Institute of Medicine's Framework for Collaborative Community Action on Health to provide a systematic description of the campaign's process of implementation, which includes: (a) developing…

Most postsecondary American Sign Language programs have an inherent connection to their local Deaf communities and rely on the community's events to provide authentic linguistic and cultural experiences for their students. While this type of activity benefits students, there is often little effort toward meaningful engagement or attention to…

Making Connections was the Annie E. Casey Foundation's signature place-based, community-change initiative of the 2000s. It sought to build on previous work and launch an effort focused firmly on the framework of family strengthening. The Foundation started Making Connections in 22 places, focusing eventually on first 10, then seven sites. It…

Improving rates of honors program completion is a goal of virtually all honors directors and deans, and research can help identify and evaluate promising strategies. A number of recent empirical studies have investigated predictors of program completion, including students' admission credentials and honors program features. Though specific…

In many high-wage industries, a high school degree no longer prepares students to enter the workforce. By 2020, labor market analysts predict that 65 percent of all jobs will require postsecondary education or training. Though high schools across the Commonwealth seek to prepare students for both higher education and the workforce, too many…

Three community colleges--El Paso Community College, Bunker Hill Community College, and Patrick Henry Community College--incorporated technology into the curriculum to support student progress in mathematics through developmental education. Each college took its own path: El Paso developed a self-accelerated emporium-style computer lab, Patrick…

As numerous studies from 1906 on have confirmed, children lose ground in learning if they lack opportunities for building skills over the summer. Nonetheless, summer learning loss comes up but rarely in the national discussion of education reform. By the end of summer, students perform on average one month behind where they left off in the spring.…

To stem the tide of students dropping out, many schools and districts are turning to early warning systems (EWS) that signal whether a student is at risk of not graduating from high school. While some research exists about establishing these systems, there is little information about the actual implementation strategies that are being used across…

Recent advances in technology are transforming our lives, but in many cases they are also limiting the way children are exposed to local communities and physical spaces. Technology can help young people actively connect with their neighborhoods, but doing that requires different methods and tools from the ones typically available in schools,…

The concept of experiential learning, in one form or another, has been around a long time, some would say going back to Confucius. More recently, however, within the United States it was put into practice in a very aggressive form, cooperative education, created by Herman Schneider and initiated at the University of Cincinnati (UC) in 1906.…

High-quality youth arts programs that take place outside the formal education system play a vital role in supporting the developmental needs and well-being of today's youth, particularly youth at risk of negative outcomes. Out-of-school time (OST) youth arts programs provide opportunities for youth to learn about themselves and their world while…

The proceedings at fifteen career education site visits are detailed in this phase 2 final report. (Phase 1, community organization mini-conferences, is described in CE 020 110.) Notes from these visitations cover such programs as career education centers, school system-based programs, and education-work councils. Several site-visit purposes are…

The School-Community Collaboration Project was conducted to train personnel to infuse career education elements into the ongoing educational process and to increase the involvement of parents and the employment community in the process. Five Massachusetts school systems participated in the project, including fifty-four educational personnel and…