Health care system changes since 1965 are reviewed. Areas in which hospital dental care can contribute to improved dental services are discussed, including the promotion of dentistry as primary care, progress in obtaining adequate reimbursement for oral health care, integration with other health professions, and improvement of credentialing and…

In trying to insulate school boards from city politics and political parties, early reformers severed board connections with other service providers. Today, worsening conditions for children and their families require "undoing" these reforms and transforming the board's role. Playing a smaller role in some executive, judicial, and…

A pilot study in three rural Colorado communities that focused on health service delivery problems related to cancer concentrated on perceptions of community influentials, health care providers, and patients and their families. Results indicate that qualitative methods can identify crucial problems for most people without losing sight of outlier…

The structures, organizations, and reward systems required to sustain universities, their faculty, and their students preclude genuine restructuring of schools of education. One promising reform path is school-based teacher education, which locates the primary faculty expertise, curriculum-development responsibility, and budget authority in school…

The Planning Alliance for Community Empowerment, a public-private organization, was formed to address the need for coordinated, efficiently managed social services programs in rapidly growing Henderson County, North Carolina. For small rural towns and counties, planning organizations lead to greater availability of services and efficient…

Explores neighborhood-based, interagency collaboration, using qualitative research methodology. Interagency participants believed that neighborhood-based collaboration provided treatment at the core of student struggles, shared responsibility among service providers for student problems, increased accessibility of services, and personalized…

Discusses how American cultural values have impacted traditional Confucian values and traditional Korean perspectives on legislation, policy, and special-education systems for people with visual impairments. The need for continuation of the transformation to enhance the educational system for people with visual impairments is stressed. (CR)

A survey of 253 Canadian school-based speech-language pathologists (SLPs) found that they use classroom-based approaches primarily for language intervention with early elementary students, judge classroom-based approaches generally successful for intervention with language, articulation, fluency, and voice disorders, and use classroom-based…

Explores ways to reduce funding fragmentation and develop a conceptual funding framework based on inclusive schooling tenets. Instead of targeting specific program units or categories of students, the inclusive school-finance framework provides more adequate support by targeting specific students. Tensions among equity, efficiency, and choice must…

Explores differences between analyses of instructional resource allocation at district and school levels in Florida's 67 counties, concentrating on possible effects of noneducational student characteristics on deprivation of educational opportunity. Results revealed clear evidence of inequality for schools with high percentages of low…

Proposes a renewed focus on parent education in early intervention but urges the development of strategies that are consistent with contemporary family-service concepts, the provision of explicit instruction to service providers in parent education strategies, and research studies on short- and long-term effects of parent education. (Author/DB)

Discussion of problems faced by early interventionists in working with families offers practical guidelines for developing effective collaborations between early intervention programs and families. These include establishing family-centered services and rules for clinician/parent communication, encouraging the family to be a genuine coparticipant,…

This article examines research on classroom-based interventions as they relate to promoting inclusion and addresses challenges facing the special education field, including the increasing diversity of the children served and of early childhood service delivery systems. The need to expand the research base on effective instructional approaches is…

The Montana state director of gifted education suggests using the term "high ability/high potential" to avoid misconceptions about gifted education; raising awareness of students' need to be challenged; countering charges of elitism; using varied identification procedures; ensuring fairness in the identification process; using a research-based…

Interactive multimedia training can be delivered via CD-ROM, hard drive, local area networks (LAN), wide area networks (WAN), Intranet, Internet and hybrid systems. This article presents a case study of how two companies (Los Angeles Times and Allen Communication) evaluated alternative delivery systems, chose one, and implemented multimedia…