In 1997, New York State passed legislation implementing Universal Prekindergarten (UPK), a new educational program with the goal of providing a voluntary, high-quality preschool experience to all 4-year-olds and improving school readiness. One of the program requirements is that school districts contract out at least 10 percent of UPK funds to…

In 1999, the Georgia Department of Education received a grant to implement character education programs in 25 schools. The intent of the four year grant was to identify schools with best practices to serve as models for the dissemination of successful programs in the state. The study included 6 high schools, 7 middle schools, and 12 elementary…

This bulletin explores promotion of school safety by increasing students' accountability for their behavior. It provides information to facilitate the development of constructive, well-conceived, accountability-based programs that work with juvenile offenders. These programs also address the issues of violence, disorder, and fear. The bulletin…

This guide presents a capacity building framework and process for demonstrating and documenting prevention outcomes. Achieving Outcomes was developed by the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention (CSAP) in response to requests from the prevention field for guidance in selecting and implementing science-based prevention programs. The guide is…

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administrations Center for Substance Abuse Prevention (CSAP) is responsible for identifying and disseminating scientifically defensible knowledge about proven prevention models and principles to the substance abuse prevention field. This booklet is intended to assist prevention practitioners and…

This document describes the Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) implementation process and key factors influencing its success. The process is described first in a one-page graphic, then in a brief summary, and finally through presentation of the full rubric. All three show a sequence of ten steps over three phases of implementation, along with a…

This planning guide is designed to help communities answer important questions about programs to address youth violence, including finding out the types of programs that are effective and learning how to implement them. The guide is divided into four sections. Section 1, "Key Facts about Youth Violence," presents key facts about youth violence…

After the first year, funding for the Reading Recovery program in the Muscogee County School District in Georgia was to be contingent upon getting results that would document the success of Reading Recovery in the system. The following measures were used for program evaluation: An Observation Survey of Early Literacy Achievement (Clay, 1993); Iowa…

School-based planning for instructional improvement has been a major national education reform focus for over 2 decades. However, many efforts proposed to put schools in charge of their own instructional operations delivered only increased discretion rather than real autonomy over internal operations, such as budgeting. In 1997, New York City…

This, the second of three annual reports by the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), continues to track central policy and developments in the implementation of the British National Literacy and Numeracy Strategies (NLS and NNS). The report considers value for money in their funding and on the perception and experience of the…

New American Schools (NAS) was formed in 1991 to create and develop whole-school designs that would be adopted by schools throughout the country in order to improve student performance. This book is a retrospective on NAS and draws together the finding from RAND research. Chapter 1, the introduction, gives an overview of NAS, RAND's purpose and…

This paper describes the implementation and evaluation of a social competence promotion program conducted in the sixth grade of a middle school. The need to increase social competence within the school arose from the results of enumerative and stakeholder data collected at the school. This paper outlines the steps of the needs assessment, program…

The authors present a step-by-step approach to a phased-in career development model to help develop, restructure, evaluate, and implement a program. Steps include: examine existing practices; sell top management; communicate corporate philosophy; integrate the program; design workshops; and evaluate. (CT)

The evaluators of Push/Excel assumed that it was a systematically developed program with measurable outcomes, not a charismatically inspired movement whose effects would be hard to pin down. As a result, neither the program nor the evaluation approach used were adequately tested. (Author)

Describes IMPACT II, an experimental teacher-to-teacher network that encourages teacher-initiated innovations by offering "developer" and "replicator" grants. Reports the results of a survey evaluation of the project and concludes that innovation works best from the bottom up. (Author/WD)