A school facility's quality and accessibility have important impacts on schools' functionality to serve as places of high-quality education. While these challenges are familiar to most schools in the United States, charter schools are responsible for acquiring and paying for their educational facilities, a responsibility that local school…

In the raging controversy over the purpose of public education and how to fix the nation's underperforming schools, the voices of America's best teachers are seldom heard. Now for the first time, in a provocative book about the future of teaching and learning, 12 of America's most accomplished classroom educators join a leading advocate for a…

This report presents in-depth analysis, pictures, and personal stories illustrating the problems that deteriorated and overcrowded schools pose for students and teachers every day. The Grassroots Factbook provides updated, at-a-glance fact sheets and organizing kits that focus on the major decisions facing communities as the federal budget year…

In a foreword to this document, David Mathews, president of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation, describes in what ways effective communities are different from ineffective ones. Following an introduction, a section on school use suggests that most schools offer nothing to adults without children, so it should be no surprise that many adults are…

Oral history plays a vital role in accurate preservation of the rural school experience and the actual restoration of some of the country's 212,000 one-room school buildings. Oral histories provide valuable, first-hand information on who taught in and who attended one-room schools, what the curriculum included, what the building looked like, and…

As a result of declining enrollments and the associated need for budget reductions, many school districts are confronting the issue of school closure. This guidebook presents an alternative to closing schools, namely, the option of transforming them into community centers and addresses the issues involved in cooperative planning with the community…

These guidelines, presented in five chapters, propose a framework to support the planning, designing, constructing, and renovating of school science facilities. Some program issues to be considered in the articulation of a science program include environmental concerns, interdisciplinary approaches, space flexibility, and electronic…

A unique collection of photographs and personal letters, journals and diaries, newspaper clippings, official reports, readers and textbooks, mail-order catalogues, architectural plans and diagrams recreate the flavor of the Canadian one-room school and the rural communities it served from the 1840's to 1960's. The emphasis is on the human…

The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) wants to ensure schools and child care facilities are safe environments for the nation's children. In response to rising public concern over the health risks posed to young children by lead in the drinking water, EPA is launching a "3Ts--Training, Testing, and Telling" program. This…