The Massachusetts charter movement facilitated Boston's development of pilot schools (in-district charters), which posed a dilemma for staff, students, board members, and codirectors of Fenway Middle College High School. A year later, a coalition of pilot school leaders is glad they stayed in the system and pursued high-level educational…

According to some participating school administrators, the process of conforming to the standardized dropout reporting system required by a national pilot project to track dropouts has been time-consuming and expensive. California experienced difficulty with adding junior high statistics. Florida exerted negligible effort, using an already…

Describes Improving Academic Achievement through Success (IMPAACTS), a program designed to assist those first-time juvenile offenders who are participating in a deferred prosecution program to improve their academic achievement. Discusses the goals, procedures and future of the program. (Author/BH)

Describes 14 organizations, programs, and research centers studying school communities: Academic Development Institute; Alliance for Achievement Network; ASPIRA; Center on Education in the Inner Cities; Center for Literacy; Center for Research in Human Development and Education; Center for the School Community; Coalition of Essential Schools;…

Case studies of the British Training Credits (TC) initiative show that the notion of a market for training driven by young people as customers is largely mythical, due to such factors as recession, importance of local networks in finding employment, and marginal involvement of small businesses. (SK)

Describes the background of library outsourcing, and discusses the quality of cataloging and physical processing services provided by Blackwell North America and B. H. Blackwell Ltd. during a one-year pilot project at Stanford University (California). At the end of the project, an error rate of less than 1% was achieved in outsourced work.…

Concerned about the serious underrepresentation of culturally different students in gifted programs, the Palm Beach County (Florida) Schools developed a pilot project that established a system for identifying minority students with potential and for designing a course of study to meet their educational needs. The program featured enrichment,…

Summarizes results of a pilot study to determine how eight moral values stated by former Education Secretary William Bennett are learned by students in classrooms. According to students, teachers must follow the rules themselves to teach character education effectively. Respect is best taught through a hidden curriculum of modeling and quality…

Administrators, counselors, and teachers from 41 Mississippi schools (n=123) supported a pilot agriscience curriculum. Science teachers expressed strong support for granting science credit for agriscience. The curriculum was perceived as primarily for students planning agricultural careers. (SK)

A program using professional-development support teams in lieu of a traditional formal evaluation system has certified staff members in Santa Cruz, California, schools feeling more positive about a formerly meaningless, demoralizing process. Key program elements include choice, support, stimulation, trust, and respect for peers' judgment. Teacher…

Provides a conceptual background for specific behavioral-therapy approach to family stress management in dealing with the sequelae of acute myocardial infarction for all family members with the goal of reducing morbidity for all family members as they cope with ongoing survivorship issues. Describes the program and discusses its pilot…

Studied the reactions of teachers to the pilot implementation of a new standards-based teacher evaluation system based on the "Framework for Teaching" of Danielson (1996). Most of the approximately 80 teachers accepted the standards and the need for the system, but many felt that the system added too much to their workload and did not…

Reviews models of information behavior and introduces a model based on the goal-directed behavior of problem solving. A key part of the information seeking and searching process, 'uncertainty reduction,' is being explored in a project supported by the British Library Research and Innovation Center. Preliminary results from the pilot phase of the…

Teachers in Denver recently approved a historic revision to the teachers' contract, in which compensation is linked, in part, to student success in the classroom. If voters fund the proposed contract in fall 2005, it could mark a new era in which teachers and communities formally accept a range of indicators that can be used to determine the…

The current study tested the effectiveness of using National Alcohol Screening Day (NASD) to deliver personalized feedback via mail. At-risk NASD participants were assigned to either personalized or generic feedback conditions and attended a 4-week follow-up. Results failed to find any group differences on alcohol-related variables. However,…