For young people who have dropped out of school, are out of work, or lack connections to family or other caring adults, there are often no easy answers. Their hopes for a better life are frequently no different than those harbored by their more advantaged peers, but their path to adulthood is rendered more difficult by tangled combinations of…

The structure and admission policy of secondary and postsecondary education in Egypt constitutes a culture of great prestige in general school and university education, as opposed to vocational school and technical education. Youth mainly from rural and underdeveloped urban areas enroll in technical education. Because of poverty, many girls and…

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) has ushered in an era of increased accountability and assumed universal proficiency at a time when there is significant variability in children's abilities as they enter kindergarten. Despite NCLB's emphasis on the use of evidence-based practices to improve students' achievement, it explicitly recommends grade…

The Chattanooga (Tennessee) public schools are building a national reputation for the work they are doing to improve the city's schools. The Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, which has promised substantial grants for the reform of urban middle school education in Chattanooga, asked the Southern Education Foundation, through its Focused Reporting…

Rather than viewing youth as an isolated and alienated subculture, it is more useful to view the needs of youth as largely determined by where and how they live, and to recognize that they differ from one another just as adults do. Professionals and volunteers in community youth programs need to understand how the youth they work with experience…

The Capacity Building Special Alternatives Program, an Elementary and Secondary Education Act Title VII-funded project in its second year of operation, functioned at seven schools in a community school district of Manhattan (New York). The project served 195 students of limited English proficiency (LEP) whose native languages were Albanian,…

The design and implementation of a broad-based intervention program for students at risk of school failure are described, and implications are drawn for efforts to improve the education of at risk children. The Learning City Program uses state-of-the-art research to create a facilitating environment in which the continuous development of children…

This report focuses on poverty and social inequality in San Francisco (California), presenting basic demographic information on the socioeconomic conditions of Latinos, African Americans, Asian/Pacific Islanders, and Whites in San Francisco, based on an analysis of U.S. Census data for 1970, 1980, and 1990. Although it presents comparative…

The literature suggests that the U.S. system of higher education has developed and maintained conservative norms that govern behavior in the classroom and discourage open dialog by dictating what is and is not appropriate to discuss in academic settings. The question is raised of the appropriateness of these norms. Classroom dialog was analyzed to…

Specific demographic changes that occurred in the New York City metropolitan area during the 1980s are described, and the challenges and opportunities facing the city in the 1990s are explored. The 1980s saw the greatest increase in the diversity of the city in its history, but sharp inequality, running along racial and ethnic lines, persists in…

This report of the "Listen '95: Kids Can't Wait" conference presents the lives and concerns of Minnesota youth as described by the youth who participated in it. The issues of alcohol and drug abuse, violence, and education were the top concerns of the youth that participated in the first statewide conference in 1994. In focusing on these…

This is the fourth edition of the Spanish version of the "Mini-Digest of Education Statistics," a publication designed to present, in compact form, statistical information about education in the United States from kindergarten through graduate school. Data are derived from many sources, but unless it is stated to the contrary,…

Charter schools are created and managed by an entity composed of parents and/ or teachers, community and/or business leaders, nonprofit organizations, and for-profit businesses. Many people believe that charter schools can provide a high quality education without the regulatory constraints of the conventional public schools. This digest reviews…

Home visits are becoming an important part of family education and support programs such as Even Start. Over time, the objectives of home visits have shifted from a deficit model, which was aimed solely at solving problems, to an empowerment model, which focuses on ameliorating conditions which lead to familial problems. The empowerment model…

Central East Middle School in Philadelphia (Pennsylvania), an urban school with about 45% Hispanic enrollment, and the Center for Research on the Education of Children Placed at Risk are working together to implement a Talent Development Middle School model of schooling. Part of this effort includes use of the Student Team Reading (STR) Program,…