High Stakes brings the voices of students and teachers to national debates over school accountability and educational reform. Recounting the experiences of two classrooms during one academic year, the book offers a critical exploration of excessive state-mandated monitoring, high-stakes testing pressures, and inequities in public school funding…

In Balancing Change and Tradition in Global Education Reform, Rotberg brings together examples of current education reforms in sixteen countries, written by "insiders". This book goes beyond myths and stereotypes and describes the difficult trade-offs countries make as they attempt to implement reforms in the context of societal and global change.…

This supplementary analysis to "Declining Share of Children Lived with Single Mothers in the Late 1990s" employs an alternative methodology to provide a clearer picture of changes in living arrangements within different income groups. The original study concluded that children were significantly less likely to live with single mothers in…

This digest, which is based on findings from a large variety of studies, reviews the known effects of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 on children to date and discusses the Act's possible future effects. Federal statistics show a positive trend in poverty reduction, though other sources are not optimistic…

This paper is about the issues relating to students lived experiences and responses associated with poverty. The authors argue that poverty is a limited and limiting concept. Instead, they focus on developing an understanding of the nature of needy students lived experiences, the impact of these on their well being and on success in several…

This study investigated how many high-poverty and high-minority schools nationwide had high student performance, identifying 4,577 schools nationwide that had students with reading and/or math performance in the top third among all schools in the state at the same grade level, at least 50 percent low-income students, and at least 50 percent…

The Department for International Development (DFID) is the British government department responsible for promoting development and the reduction of poverty in sites in developing and transition countries around the world. This paper focuses on the education dimension of poverty reduction, and specifically the attainment of the International…

This paper examines the impact of Colombia's Programa de Ampliacion de Cobertura de la Educacion Secundaria (PACES), which provided over 125,000 poor students with private secondary school vouchers, many of which were awarded by lottery. Researchers surveyed lottery winners and losers to compare educational and other outcomes. Results showed no…

This report provides policymakers with detailed information on the characteristics of California's teachers. Information comes from state-collected teacher workforce data and a series of case studies conducted in schools and districts statewide in 2000 and 2001. Overall, low achieving, poor, and minority students are much more likely to have…

The federal Migrant Education Program provides supplemental instruction and other support services to migrant children. The program provides formula grants to states under Title I, Part C, of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. This document summarizes the data from a three-volume study, which examined how the program is helping migrant…

The situation of schools in the Democratic Republic of Congo in matters concerning new information and communication technologies remains alarming. Given the primary role of these technologies in teaching and learning, as well as the concern of giving Congolese rural schools access to these tools, considering the problems of lack of electricity,…

The proportion of variance in student achievement that is explained by student SES-"poverty's power rating," as some dub it--tends to be lower among smaller schools than among larger schools. Small schools, many claim, are able to somehow disrupt the seemingly axiomatic association between SES and student achievement. Using eighth-grade…

This paper describes an evaluation strategy designed to assess the efficacy of an education system at the district level. The strategy provides a measure of accountability that takes into account the potential effects of demographic variables. The study focused on Bellevue Public Schools (Washington), a medium-sized district near Seattle with an…

These three brochures discuss important issues related to child welfare. The first, "Family Support: A New Approach to Child Well-Being," summarizes this philosophy of community service. Family support is defined and differentiated from traditional services; its advantages are outlined; and specific family support programs in…

This report presents five commonly held stereotypes about children in the United States and analyzes their validity through discussion of data related to each. These stereotypes include: (1) births to unmarried women have increased tremendously mostly because of women of color; (2) child poverty is a problem in the inner city, not in the suburbs…