Examines potential advantages of Advance Placement (AP) courses for students and schools. Reviews literature on the effects of AP courses on students, AP implications for college admissions, AP implications for college attendance, AP economic implications, and AP program concerns. Concludes that AP program advantages for students, schools, and…

Presents four group experiential activities, primarily for adults and adolescents, focusing on diversity issues. Includes target group, group size, time and space needs, activity level, overview, goals, props, instructions, and suggestions for framing and debriefing the experience. Activities promote perspective taking, honest dialogue between…

Shifts in federal financial aid policies over the past two decades have made college attendance increasingly difficult for the nation's poorest students. Furthermore, once these students do enroll, they lag far behind their more economically advantaged peers in graduation rates. Because financial aid increasingly emphasizes loans over grants, many…

The "Closing the Achievement Gap" series explores the Casey Foundation's education investments and presents stories, results, and lessons learned. This publication looks at the various influence activities the Foundation's education program has supported in the past seven years. It also explains the logic behind this diverse set of investments,…

This study analyzes Census data which indicate the following U.S. poverty trends for 1988: (1) the gap between rich and poor is wider than at any point in the post World War II era; (2) the poverty rate showed no improvement and remains higher than the most severe recession years of the 1970s; (3) the share of the national family income going to…

It became fashionable in the 1960's for members of the community to become involved with education, but at the same time this involvement has forced the two extreme groups in society, the rich and the poor, into an uneasy consensus about the public education system. The author points out several factors which help shape the community's attitude…

This document describes, in four progress reports, the development and initial projects of a 6-year study, the Montessori Research Project, which is seeking to determine the benefits to preschool children of various educational programs, specifically, Montessori programs versus non-Montessori programs. The study is being conducted by the…

With only a small number of their students coming from families with the lowest incomes (10% from the bottom two family income quintiles), the nation's most selective private colleges and universities need to know why. Two ready ideological answers are (1) that low-income high-ability students are being excluded in order to favor the children of…

The charitable tax deduction has created a system in which the rich can choose to support institutions that perpetuate their own class, with little scrutiny by the general public or elected officials. Museums, libraries, orchestras, etc., receive more gifts than do programs that benefit the needy. (MLW)

Trends in occupational mobility for U.S. males, 1972-90, were analyzed using three occupational scales providing different indicators of occupational status and social stratification. Results indicate stable or increasing rigidity in U.S. occupational stratification, with a decline in education's importance, both as key to achieving high rank and…

A computerized test of preparedness for effortful processing (alerting attention), response to orienting cues (orienting attention), and response to the interference of competing demands (executive attention) was administered to a diverse sample of 249 children (47% female, 4.96 to 7.27 years) to assess developmental properties and…

This article addresses the failure of sustainability of reform efforts in public school systems by reconceptualizing the perplexing notion of sustainability through a case study to discern the skill sets needed of principals to sustain reforms in urban settings. This study draws on perceptual data gathered from principals in 36 schools in one…

The problematic of this research concerns the question of the co-construction of the representations of intelligence between mother and daughter, according to their age and contrasted socio-cultural environments. Our goal is to show that mothers and their daughters (for whom intelligence is a part of their everyday experiences, through their…

Administrative data on fifth grade students in North Carolina shows that more highly qualified teachers tend to be matched with more advantaged students, both across schools and in many cases within them. This matching biases estimates of the relationship between teacher characteristics and achievement; we isolate this bias in part by focusing on…

Objective: To identify predictors and moderators of response to acute treatments among depressed adolescents (N = 439) randomly assigned to fluoxetine, cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), both fluoxetine and CBT, or clinical management with pill placebo in the Treatment for Adolescents With Depression Study (TADS). Method: Potential baseline…