The International Child Development Initiatives (ICDI) promotes the wellbeing of children growing up in difficult circumstances. ICDI works to improve policies and practices affecting these children by doing research and training. ICDI believes in the power of children and young people, supporting their rights and addressing the underlying causes…

A compelling body of research shows that when students are part of smaller and more intimate learning communities, they are more successful. The latest research demonstrates that small schools, particularly schools of choice, have a measurably positive impact on inner-city students, especially those from minority and low-income families. The…

The Community Achievement Project in the Schools (CAPS) is a public-private partnership between the Untied Way of New York City and the New York City Board of Education. As part of a dropout prevention initiative, CAPS is designed to integrate the services of community-based organizations and schools. The Teachers College of Columbia University…

Mentoring has a mystique that only good can come from it, that at the worst, mentoring programs will not accomplish all that they could, but the youth served will at least be better for the experience. Both impact and process evaluations are needed to answer questions about the real benefits and any potential adverse effects of mentoring. The…

Mentoring is now a very popular, but loosely defined, feature of many programs for youth. The heart of mentoring is the relationship between the youth and the mentor, but little is actually known about this relationship. Mentoring should not be limited to at-risk youth, since many average students or underachievers from stable backgrounds may…

Dropout Reduction through Education, Achievement, and Motivation (Project DREAM) was designed to serve the needs of Latino immigrants who had scored at or below the 40th percentile on the Language Assessment Battery. The design-incorporating plans for group and individual guidance sessions to help students improve their interpersonal skills. It…

The school district of the City of Saginaw operates a supplemental educational delivery Chapter 1 system in reading and mathematics, the Elementary Compensatory Education (CE) program and the Secondary CE program. The elementary CE, a push-in program operating in the regular classroom and a pull-out program (periodically taking students out of…

Robert W. Coleman Elementary School in Baltimore (Maryland) is a school that is exemplary by virtue of its efforts to build on the strengths of students and the community. Although it is not yet a model of curriculum or instruction, it operates in an ethical and theoretical framework with much to say to the urban educator. The school, which serves…

This monograph explores strategies and programs that use both traditional and emerging resources for educating at-risk students. In general, schools have responded to student diversity with various systems of sorting and selecting students into more homogeneous learning groups. Ability grouping and tracking exemplify this approach. Retention, or…

At the margins of American education are students with unusual needs who challenge teachers to the limits of their commitments, insights, and skills. This paper considers the marginalized students in inner-city schools and suggests ways to improve education for them and for all students. There are disproportionate numbers of racial and ethnic…

Those involved in early childhood development must recognize that many of their most cherished beliefs about what is best for children are cultural constructions. This book focuses on quality in large-scale programs for disadvantaged young children in a variety of cultural settings. Chapter 1, "Changing Childhoods," discusses issues…

This paper describes five models of school-university collaboration designed to maximize academic achievement opportunities for disadvantaged rural students. Project SHAPE (School and Homes As Partners in Education) at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Plattsburgh is an extended school day program established in partnership with…

How low-income Brazilian students explain their school performance and the predominant achievement causes were studied. The relationship between achievement attribution and school achievement and students' conceptions of choice, career, agency, and relationship with achievement were also studied, using the causal attribution theory of B. Weiner.…

In the world of social science and educational research, Asian Americans are frequently represented as one group and summarized with one number, like an arithmetic average. However, Asian Americans think of themselves as quite different from one another, as indeed they are. In the 1990 U.S. Census, information is available for 11 different groups…

This guide, which includes both English and Spanish versions, discusses parent involvement policies, which explain how the school district or the school itself supports the important role of parents in the education of their children. Every school district that receives money from Title I of the Improving America's Schools Act, the federal aid…