In this article, The Social Justice Education in Schools (SJES) Project integrates field-based study and existing research to identify five key Principles of Social Justice Education in Schools. An outgrowth of the federally funded Massachusetts Coalition for Teacher Quality and Student Achievement, the SJES Project seeks to positively impact…

Changing school demographics, coupled with a teaching force that is predominantly white and female, has created a growing discrepancy between teachers and the students they teach. Many children and children in poverty do not display the behaviors or experience the type or degree of success in school as white or middle-class students do.…

Identifying effective interventions to help children with autism reach their potential has been a source of disagreement among professionals and parents for decades. The complexities of the challenges that face children with autism, and uncertainty about best practices, have delayed progress. This article identifies seven critical program…

The quest for perfection has been anecdotally associated with great achievement and despair; with adjustment and maladjustment. No population has more frequently been associated with perfectionism than the gifted. This study was designed to (i) identify the types of perfectionism observed in a sample of Australian school students, and (ii) to…

Drawing on Foucault's tools on subjectivity, the positions offered to Sarah in an early childhood centre and new entrant school classroom are examined. This paper draws on data from interviews with Sarah, her mother, and her teachers, which problematise the discursive meanings for Sarah's continuing educational experiences and her sense of…

Developing trusting relationships between teachers and students in urban secondary schools everywhere is a challenging task that is essential to maintaining an effective learning environment. Trust involves a fragile web of relationships nurtured through positive daily interactions. We examined strategies that US urban high school teachers used to…

In the present study, the authors investigated the academic subject matter domain specificity of the social-cognitive career choice model (R. W. Lent, S. D. Brown, & G. Hackett, 1994). The relationships between self-efficacy, goals, outcome expectations, and interests were examined across the subject areas of art, social science, math/science, and…

Murphy examines the influence of four African American families' beliefs, values, and interactions on their children's academic achievement. Parents' high expectations and focus on educational attainment, religious and spiritual values, and kinship bonds, as well as active oversight of homework and encouragement of critical thinking, establish the…

The expectations, self-perceptions, past academic behaviors, and attitudes of transfer students were examined in this study. Participants were 2,492 incoming transfer students (53% female, 14% African American, 14% Asian American or Pacific Islander, 6% Hispanic/Latino/a, and 65% White, and had a mean age of 21.8) at a mid-Atlantic doctoral…

This article deals with human desperation at its worst--the desperation of children who, through no fault of their own, live lives few of us can imagine. They are child prostitutes. The impetus for this article came through the senior author's work with the Office of Disaster Prevention and Preparedness and Labor and Social Affairs (DPP-LSA) in…

The Chattanooga (Tennessee) public schools are building a national reputation for the work they are doing to improve the city's schools. The Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, which has promised substantial grants for the reform of urban middle school education in Chattanooga, asked the Southern Education Foundation, through its Focused Reporting…

This report summarizes research on teacher effectiveness in social studies classrooms. Observations were conducted in a large urban school district on the west coast of the United States, as well as in selected classrooms in Australia, New Zealand, Poland, and Germany since 1991. Effective teachers are those for whom there is evidence that…

This study examined how teachers in a Christian school in the North Bay, California, area, perceive the academic and behavioral performance of students whose parents are involved in the school compared to the performance of students whose parents are not involved. Parental involvement includes parents attending parent-teacher conferences, open…

A study of West Virginia elementary schools examined why similar types of elementary students differ greatly in academic achievement. In the first phase of the study, a comparison of 33 high- and 33 low-achieving elementary schools in West Virginia found that low-achieving schools had 2.5 times more low-income students than high-achieving schools,…

School reform in the 1990s has been focused on school-based restructuring, with local efforts shown to be more successful than earlier central or remote control approaches. Success has followed changes in teachers' classroom behavior, in the structure of the school, and its school culture. The local school restructuring approach is illustrated…