Head Start, the nation's largest early childhood intervention, has enjoyed public and political support. The program has also been haunted by persistent questions about its role in communities, its sustainable impacts, and its quality. This book discusses the past, present, and future of Head Start in the hope of creating better partnerships…

The mere act of living in today's society is dangerous to the health and well-being of children and adolescents. The concept of the socially toxic environment is offered as a parallel to the environmental movement's analysis of physical toxicity. Social life is more risky than it was just 40 years ago, and the level of social and cultural poison…

This consideration of learning style and the minority student analyzes and synthesizes the research that reveals the similarities and differences among the learning styles of culturally diverse populations and describes how to teach and counsel adolescents with different learning styles. Research suggests that students whose instruction is not…

Data from the National Education Longitudinal Survey (NELS) are used to examine the relationship between minimum competency testing and dropout rates. Proponents of such testing have argued that minimum competency tests provide incentives for schools and students, but opponents have argued that such tests lead to a low-level basic skills…

Various model programs for comprehensive health service delivery to adolescents have been proposed and implemented, but few of these programs have been evaluated systematically. This monograph identifies 664 programs that provide comprehensive or integrated services and reports the results of a survey completed by 435 programs. Two-thirds of all…

A national consensus has been developing in recent years on the crisis of values faced by the United States. A measure that has recently reemerged and captured a measure of public attention is character education. This paper examines the degree to which state governments and their educational establishments have attempted to use character…

This book examines much of the large body of research on educational inequality in Britain since the Second World War, focusing on studies concerned with inequalities in the internal organization and functioning of the schools. A social constructionist approach to the study of social problems as a way of providing a reflexive perspective on the…

The purpose of this study was to determine if there was a significant difference in low socioeconomic fourth graders' retention of library information skills who are taught these skills in isolation and those who are taught within the context of a Social Studies lesson. Two groups of fourth graders participated. Library information skills lessons…

The three essays of this collection explore the prevention of violence in urban schools. The first, "Preventing Violence in Schools," by Mary Hatwood Futrell and Lee Etta Powell, focuses on how to prevent violence in schools and offers recommendations on what schools and communities can do. The factors contributing to school violence are…

Community-based early childhood education and development programs can serve a geographical community, but may also serve a group not necessarily from the same community but who have a deep interest in one or more community-based schools. This set of booklets provides a proposal and program characteristics for a community-based early childhood…

Title I, the largest federal aid program for elementary, middle, and high schools, is introduced in this publication, which includes both English and Spanish versions. Through Title I, the Federal government gives money to school districts around the country based on the number of low-income families in each district. Each district uses Title I…

This paper is a preliminary report on a study that explored the ways in which African American male adolescents cope with the interpersonal assaultive violence that takes place in their urban communities. Participants were 27 African American male adolescents, aged 13-19, who live in and/or spend the majority of their non-school hours interacting…

In an ethnographic reflection on 10 years experience working in the high schools of inner-city New York, issues of school safety, discipline, and violence are explored. The central proposition is that the mentality that relies on paramilitary security measures and technological devices, such as metal detectors, to achieve safe schools is only an…

The Learning City Program (LCP), based on research at the National Center on Education in the Inner Cities, was developed to promote the radical improvement of learning in city schools by linking schools with other learning environments, including homes, libraries, museums, the workplace, institutions of higher learning, and other public and…

Books in the Opposing Viewpoints Series present debates about current issues that can be used to teach critical reading and thinking skills. The opinions expressed in the selections in each series title examine many different aspects of a single issue. Detractors of the welfare system have long argued that the system promotes dependency. They…