This volume presents the 2009 Yearbook of the National Council of Professors of Educational Administration. This year's theme is "Remembering Our Mission: Making Education and Schools Better for Students." This Yearbook contains six parts. Part 1, Invited Chapters, includes the following: (1) President's Message: Remembering Our Mission…

The purpose of this ethnographic study is to examine how a commitment to socially just pedagogies influences the core practices and policies of a school. This article presents a comprehensive description and analysis of two public middle schools committed to teaching for social justice: Urban Promise Academy and San Francisco Community School.…

With the enactment of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), the United States entered the "age of high-stakes educational accountability". According to the United States Department of Education, NCLB is designed to change the culture of America's schools by closing the achievement gap, offering more flexibility, giving parents more…

The percentage of variance in student achievement that is explained by student SES--"poverty's power rating," as some call it--tends to be less among smaller schools than among larger schools. Smaller schools, we are told, are able to somehow disrupt the association between SES and student achievement. Using eighth-grade data for 215…

Alcohol use among urban youth has been regularly surveyed, but assessment of rural residents is rare. Information about factors associated with attitudes toward drinking could be especially useful to school counselors. This study used questionnaires to investigate the association of attitudes toward alcohol and alcohol use with the following…

This book offers a range of original perspectives on issues of planning and managing education in small systems. It is based on the proceedings of a conference held at the University of London's Institute for Education, supported by the European Community Directorate General for Development. The conference addressed a range of themes relevant to…

This handbook presents a snapshot view of the use of telecommunications technologies to deliver instruction to distant audiences of K-12 students in the United States. The information is intended specifically for people who work in and with small, rural, or remote schools. Available technologies and programming vary widely in offerings and…

Distance education technologies can help rural schools overcome the disadvantages of geographic isolation by expanding course offerings and learning opportunities and by connecting teachers with resource materials and training programs. Classroom-focused distance learning is distance insensitive and implies simultaneous instruction of several…

This proceedings contains 26 summaries of conference presentations and discussions. Titles and authors are: "Is a Sexual Harassment Policy Enough To Protect Against Liability?" (Camille Barnett); "Recreating the Communities of Our Youth" (Marlyn Benson); "Creating a Language of Ethics in Rural Schooling" (Terry R. Berkeley, Linda P. Thurston);…

Research on adolescent stress indicates that most high school students have experienced stress. This study was conducted to learn more about stress in western Kansas high school students. The sample was from 1A schools, defined as having less than 75 students enrolled in grades 10 to 12. Three-hundred twenty-two students participated. Stress was…

An economical strategy used to expand the curriculum at the Peterson (Minnesota) secondary school, a small rural facility, is described. The need for an enriched curriculum was identified on the basis of several shortcomings perceived in the existing school program: few electives, student stereotyping and cliques, and inadequate special needs…

The historical review outlines the activities of the Queensland Itinerant Service from 1901-1930. The report begins with an account of the Service's first traveling teacher, Mr. Johnson, who in his first year of duty visited 103 homesteads that housed 113 families having 319 children of school age; of its peak period in 1921 when there were 18…

People working together on community projects benefit both themselves and the community. Quality Circles (Theory Z) is an example of this principle at work in industry. Employees who are involved in the decision-making process turn out a lower-cost, higher-quality product. This concept could prove valuable in small schools if students were…

The movement toward small school consolidation was based in part on the presumption that academic achievement was lower in small schools, but the results of a study showed that school size was not significantly related to academic achievement in elementary and secondary schools in New Mexico. To determine the relationship of school size and…

This packet describes 10 promising practices identified in small and rural elementary schools in New Hampshire, New York, and Vermont. Descriptions of the following innovations are presented: (1) community volunteers with diverse talents and experience became enrichment "teachers" during school time for students in intermediate grades,…