Middle school reformers have widely promoted advisory programs as a way to strengthen connectedness at the middle level. Broadly defined, advisory programs are configurations in which an adult advisor meets regularly during the school day with a group of students to provide academic and social-emotional mentorship and support, to create…

"Outlook" is the monthly newsletter for the Council for American Private Education (CAPE). Each issue contains information relating to private education such as: new legislation and regulations, the most recent research, court rulings, national trends, federal initiatives, private school news briefs, and more. This issue contains the following…

Adolescent willing and desiring is pervasive in mainstream American culture. The result is that America's youth is drowning in itself, in the immaturity, impulsiveness, and pastlessness of our dominant culture. Listening to the voices of youth caught in this crisis, and drawing from the observations of thinkers such as Nietzsche, Erikson, Baldwin,…

The extent to which students feel connected to their school is a powerful predictor of many health, social and academic outcomes. These outcomes are also influenced by other factors including characteristics of the school such as its size, policies and practices, but how do these characteristics modify the relationship between a student and his or…

Counselors, psychologists, and evaluators of intervention programs for youth increasingly view the promotion of connectedness as an important intervention outcome. When evaluating these programs, researchers frequently test whether the treatment effects differ across gender and ethnic or racial groups. Doing so necessitates the availability of…

In 1999, the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) identified the need for national data on the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) students and launched the first National School Climate Survey (NSCS). At the time, the school experiences of LGBT youth were under-documented and nearly absent from national…

School is sometimes framed as a place for preparing, a place for becoming college and career ready. At times this approach positions school as an important space "within" the world of college and careers, envisioned perhaps as Dewey imagined it, as a safe place to try things, a space where real work of participation in society could be done but in…

Objectives: This article provides an introduction to the October 2011 special issue of the "Journal of School Health" on "Healthier Students Are Better Learners." Methods: Literature was reviewed and synthesized to identify health problems affecting school-aged youth that are highly prevalent, disproportionately affect urban minority youth,…

Objectives: To outline the prevalence and disparities of aggression and violence among school-aged urban minority youth, causal pathways through which aggression and violence adversely affects academic achievement, and proven or promising approaches for schools to address these problems. Methods: Literature review. Results: Recent national data…

Public/Private Ventures' (P/PV's) "GroundWork" series summarizes available evidence on a variety of social policy topics, providing a solid foundation for future work. This first issue reviews the current literature about the potential benefits of simultaneously providing three services in school--healthcare, out-of-school-time learning and family…

This research is a phenomenological study of former alternative high school students' perceptions about their educational experiences. The primary purpose of this study was to gain insight into the shared experiences of these former students. Data were gathered from a series of focus groups, individual interviews and archival data. This study…

When Superintendent Anthony Amato arrived in Stockton, California's 38,000-student district, he knew that three of its four comprehensive high schools had been labeled "dropout factories." Mr. Amato, who has led the Hartford, Connecticut, Kansas City, Missouri, and New Orleans districts, studied Stockton's data to form his plan. Then he…

This study examines delinquent behavior among schoolchildren in a nationally representative sample from the United States and seeks an understanding of the factors contributing to variances in delinquency across immigration generations. Data analysis indicates that the levels of self-reported substance use, property delinquency, and violent…

This article focuses on the everyday ways that children's perspectives on and experiences within urban schools are chronicled and interpreted. Drawing on illustrations from two students' experiences across a school year in one classroom, the author argues that students in urban schools are everyday documentarians, sharing their relationships to…

In this study, I examined the relationship that exists among school belonging, achievement motivation, and academic achievement in a sample of student-athletes at UC Berkeley. The goal of the study was to achieve a deeper understanding of how and why achievement motivation and academic achievement is often discrepant between revenue and…