Quality improvement centers were created by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Children's Bureau beginning in 2001 to promote knowledge development through an innovative approach to applied collaborative research in child welfare. The National Quality Improvement Center on the Privatization of Child Welfare Services was funded to…

In February 2001, President George W. Bush announced his New Freedom Initiative to promote increased access to educational and employment opportunities for people with disabilities. In his charge to the Commission, the President directed its members to study the problems and gaps in the mental health system and make concrete recommendations for…

With local Cooperative Extension agents serving as a bridge between university-based researchers and local community members, the PRIDE Project's collaborative activities have included building university-community relationships; carrying out needs assessments, program planning, and program evaluation research; and conducting policy seminars at…

This report examines the need for and resources available to environmental and conservation groups to develop skills in raising money and recruiting new members, managing an organization, communicating with the press, and analyzing policy issues. Data were obtained from 225 questionnaires returned by representative groups (411 were mailed), an…

The School Planning, Evaluation, and Communication System (SPECS) is an overall design for districtwide program assessment and development. It is both a way of interrelating planning and evaluation of individual programs and a way of comparing the outcomes of all district programs with the district's community-defined educational goals. Component…

Realities of a multilingual, multiethnic workforce and the services available in the current employment and training system are discussed in this report, which outlines the main Federal programs that provide employment and training for the foreign-born. Also highlighted are issues raised by participants in the Immigrant Policy Project's regional…

During 1974-75, enrollment in the Metropolitan Community Colleges (MCC) (Kansas City, Missouri) increased from 10,589 to more than 21,000 full- and part-time students. The Metropolitan Institute of Community Services (a college without walls) expanded from serving fewer than 2,000 students in 1973-74 to more than 16,000 in 1974-75. From MCC's…

This monograph focuses on issues involved in delivering effective career education to minority persons. Section 1 reviews concerns and fears of minority leaders relating to career education as a concept and discusses the six career education missions of the U.S. Office of Education. Section 2 discusses the applicability of process and programmatic…

The health manpower planning experiences of four countries reported here were presented in a traveling seminar held for member countries of the Pan American Health Organization. Focus was on what should be carried out in any country to coordinate the training of health workers with the operation of health services. Following the introduction, the…

This is a report of the ACCESS (Alternative Comprehensive Community Environmental Study System), a prototype program in democratic policy making at the regional level. Presented first is a discussion of the relationship between science, technology, and regional policy and the use of visual communication for regional policy making. The second…

Twenty-four symposium participants from across Canada, all working in some way on language development in Native education, presented summaries of their work and then identified the most serious and widespread problems in the field and made recommendations for improvement. Six major problem categories were identified: (1) language and language…

This document reports on phases 2 and 3 of the Phare Special Preparatory Programme for the European Social Fund (SPP-ESF), which involved national, supplementary, and local seminars to assess the following countries' needs for assistance from the ESF: Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, the Slovak…

Prepared for State University of New York/Buffalo researchers participating in a state-sponsored educational financing project, this background paper focuses on the vocational education "program effects" of changing financial aid formulas and/or the rationale for organizing school districts and regional services. It scrutinizes the role of Boards…

This document contains nine papers devoted to the labor market problems faced by out-of-school and other disadvantaged young people in the United States and policy options and strategies for addressing those problems. The papers update the data on out-of-school young adults, review the lessons learned from past youth programs and policies,…