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.…

This policy brief examines the infrastructure needed to support early education at the Department of Education in the coming years. The Department's newly announced reform agenda will reshape how prekindergarten is managed. It's goal is to help inform the decisions the City must make to integrate an expanding prekindergarten program into Children…

Multilevel confirmatory factor analysis was used to evaluate the factor structure underlying the 12-item, three-factor "Interagency Collaboration Activities Scale" (ICAS) at the informant level and at the agency level. Results from 378 professionals (104 administrators, 201 service providers, and 73 case managers) from 32 children's mental health…

Parental involvement and parent-school-community partnerships receive wide acclaim for making a positive difference in the educational and transition outcomes for youth with and without disabilities. Although the impact of parental involvement in education remains undisputed, secondary education traditionally emphasizes the emerging adult…

Providing high-quality education and care for young children at a historically Black university in rural South Africa was a challenging task. But despite many obstacles, two teacher educators (an American and a South African) worked together, partnered with a surprising collection of others, seized every possible opportunity, and persisted, seeing…

State Extension programs can contribute to the successful adoption of national environmental education programs by making locally relevant resources available, creating reference materials to bridge between 4-H project books and other resources, and developing companion materials that supplement national materials with local issues and resources.…

In this issue of "Odyssey," Joanne Corwin describes New Mexico's statewide partnership among several agencies for the provision of early intervention services to infants and children who are deaf or hard of hearing and their families (Effective Partnering of State Agencies to Achieve Early Hearing Detection and Intervention Benchmarks,…

Educational reform in the United States is perpetually evolving. Much of the recent reforms have concentrated on high-stakes testing and assessment, but a parallel effort has been emerging in the field of vocational and career education. Prompted partly by federal legislation--most recently by the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act…

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…

The National Dropout Prevention Center for Students with Disabilities (NDPC-SD) was assigned the task of compiling, analyzing, and summarizing the data for Indicator 2--Dropout--from the FFY 2010 Annual Performance Reports (APRs) and the revised State Performance Plans (SPPs), which were submitted to the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP)…

The Centre for Environment Education (CEE) added an Industry Initiative to its portfolio of more traditional environmental education programs in 1993. This article documents the start-up and evolution of that program and the ways that businesses and CEE have worked together for a sustainable future. A specific 18-month project, in which CEE and an…

The purpose of this investigation is to tell the story of how six states are developing Programs of Study (POS) as mandated by the Perkins IV federal legislation. The authors' effort focuses on how states' technical assistance systems evolved and what successes and challenges existed for states developing POS. There was no intent to compare one…

This review traces the evolution from 1971 to the present of a national technical assistance (TA) program to support the creation, expansion, and improvement of services for infants, toddlers, and preschoolers with special needs. From its beginning as a TA resource for demonstration projects, to linking outreach projects' expertise with state…

Education leaders across the country confront a growing challenge: too many students are not college ready when they leave high school. Although indicators exist to identify students at risk of dropping out of high school, few indicators of students' college readiness are currently in place, and few districts have linked indicators to practices…

The schools' inspection regime in England has shifted in recent decades from a focus on external assessment of practice to a scrutiny of external data and schools' self-evaluation, culminating in a normative system based on self-surveillance by school senior managers. This model of inspection (characteristic of the performative approach to public…