In this article, the authors discuss why ranking has become so popular in schools. Those who promote ranking believe that it provides information to help parents and students choose a "good school"; that it puts pressure on the underperforming school to improve; and that it provides an opportunity for a school to be scrutinized through a…

As New Zealand tertiary education has undergone extensive review processes, debate has centred not only on the need to extend the participation rates of groups previously under-represented, but also how to retain these under-represented groups once they are recruited into tertiary programmes. This paper draws on a large-scale study of the factors…

Hurricane Katrina made landfall near New Orleans, Louisiana, on August 29, 2005. The author discusses the efforts she and other Association for Childhood Education International (ACEI) colleagues made for the welfare of children who suffered from the storm. After her initial search for family, friends, and professional colleagues, she began trying…

Results of the Black Metropolis Model (BMM) of service learning are analyzed and illustrated in this article to explain how to "put the learning in service learning." There are many soup kitchens or nontransforming models of service learning where students are asked to serve needy populations but internalize and learn little about the…

This discussion summarizes comments made at the National Academy for Superintendents held at The Ohio State University focusing on changes practitioners have experienced in the area of school communication. The article examines how broad community themes, linking education to the entire community fabric, have resonated and better served the…

The rise of a community engagement movement offers a range of possibilities for universities to function as "sites of citizenship". These include contributing to community social and economic infrastructure, supporting equity and diversity within higher education, and education for democratic citizenship. This article provides an…

There are critical challenges for the design of effective school-based mental health delivery systems. Atkins et al. (2003) provide illustrative examples of how these challenges can be addressed in ways that can significantly increase children's access to empirically supported interventions, integrate programming into existing school leadership…

This article focuses on how teachers worked to build a meaningful curriculum around changes to a neighborhood and school grounds in a precinct listed for urban renewal. Drawing on a long-term relationship with the principal and one teacher, the researchers planned and designed a collaborative project to involve children as active participants in…

Civic engagement is an area ripe for increased pedagogical attention in the discipline of Political Science. However, almost all efforts are limited to courses on local, state, and national government. We teach about the often intricate connections between domestic and international politics, but opportunities for students to research and practice…

This article presents findings from the ACCESS Project focusing on the impact of an outreach initiative that used "data sharing" as a mechanism to establish a wide variety of academic-community partnerships for cancer awareness. The Community Barometer, a brief needs assessment tool developed for this purpose, was used to collect data from…

Students who are chronically absent are more likely than other students to drop out of school. Many schools have goals to reduce student truancy and to help chronically absent students attend school regularly. Few studies, however, have focused on whether or how family and community involvement help reduce rates of chronic absenteeism. In this…

This paper examines the choices parents have made regarding language of instruction in their children's classrooms, particularly in California after the implementation of Proposition 227. The data for this study are drawn from a 2-year ethnography of eight Latino families from an urban immigrant Latino community. The parents in the study held a…

In this article, the author relates his experience of being attacked for teaching American history at a rural school in north Alabama using a critical, more inclusive approach to American history and social studies. He describes how he struggled with the notion of perspective in teaching primary documents, particularly papers written by those not…

The history of educational reform and innovation is replete with good ideas or policies that fail to get implemented or that are successful in one situation but not in another. A missing ingredient in most failed cases is appreciation and use of what is called change knowledge: understanding and insight about the process of change and the key…

Minority groups make up a large share of the working and the non-working poor. Moreover, throughout the last several decades, many minority students in the large urban schools, particularly Hispanic, Native and African-American, have had a difficult time taking advantage of a public education. The major tension points and associated problems…