Institutional characteristics of preschool centers can influence the successful implementation of professional development programming. This article provides an overview of a dynamic Head Start teacher professional development program. The program, conducted by a well-respected theatre-in-education organization, was designed to help preschool…

Using a social ecological approach (Bronfenbrenner) to violence and including Hobsbawm's historical analysis of the collective uses of violence, this article shows how gender-based violence is experienced and used. Drawing on three distinct studies in Ghana, Kenya and South Africa, it shows the commonalities and divergence of young people's…

Palestinian youth face developmental, cultural, and political barriers that impede them from fully engaging in civic life. Non-traditional, youth-centered pedagogies of engagement, like community-based service-learning (CBSL), have shown promise to motivate marginalized populations and provide space and roles for them to form individual identities…

Historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) have suffered disproportionately in the current financial crisis. The difficult situations at these institutions have many causes, but they stem in large part from the commitment of HBCUs to serving disadvantaged students and from the history of underfunding and discrimination that disadvantages…

Given the importance of the early childhood period as a time when the foundation is laid for later language and literacy, it is important to determine what activities and experiences lead to positive language and literacy outcomes in early childhood. This Fact Sheet reviews fifteen experimentally-evaluated programs and intervention strategies that…

The school readiness of Head Start students has become a major concern in the United States. The purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study was to explore Head Start teachers' lived experiences and perceptions of the instructional behaviors necessary for preparing students for kindergarten. The study sample consisted of a purposive…

Improvement of educational attainment in schools in urban, disadvantaged areas is an important priority for policy--particularly in countries like England which have a long tail at the bottom of the educational distribution and where there is much concern about low social mobility. An anomaly in the spatial dimension of school funding policy in…

The extent to which education can compensate for social disadvantage is a matter of political controversy, especially in the context of policies for social mobility. On the one hand, to blame poor achievement on social class or poverty was seen to dodge the professional responsibility of teachers. On the other, the strong correlation between…

This paper reports on an interview study with directors of Head Start and child care programs who are collaborating with local education authorities to provide publicly funded preschool in New Jersey, USA. A standardized interview protocol was utilized with 98 directors chosen to represent a range of center types from across the three main regions…

The present study examined the relationships between caregivers' self-reported positive and negative emotional expressiveness, observer assessments of children's emotion regulation, and teachers' reports of children's internalizing and externalizing behaviors in a sample of 97 primarily African American and Hispanic Head Start families. Results…

The purpose of this descriptive study was to examine circle time activities in eight Head Start classrooms. A total of 7 h of observations occurred in eight classrooms. Songs and academic activities were the most frequently occurring activities. Challenging behavior during circle time also was examined. The three activities with the highest…

Research Findings: Effects of parenting quality on the academic functioning of young homeless children were examined using data from 58 children ages 4 to 7 and their parents during their stay at an emergency homeless shelter. Parenting quality, child executive function, child intellectual functioning, and risk status were assessed in the shelter,…

James Ryan, a prominent and learned law professor at the University of Virginia (and a former colleague of the author), has produced a scholarly, well-written, and exhaustively researched book on education policy, "Five Miles Away, A World Apart" (Oxford). This article presents the author's critique on Ryan's book. The author argues that…

The development of a global form of citizenship stands in a rather tense relation with the realities of vast numbers of marginalised citizens across the globe, to the extent that marginality appears to be the hidden other of global citizenship. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the development of a political economy of global citizenship…

Ensuring the education of marginalized children has become an important agenda in order to reach the goals of universal primary education and gender equality. Education policies and projects aiming to target marginalized children often do so on the basis of demographic variables, such as sex, ethnicity, poverty and geography. We argue that this…