This report takes a look at the issues concerning racial segregation and educational outcomes in Metropolitan Boston. Despite the fact that metro Boston is overwhelmingly white, its public schools are highly segregated by race and language. Segregated minority schools in metro Boston are profoundly unequal, with high poverty levels, with lower…

Educators are under increasing pressure from policymakers and the public to demonstrate that educational resources are used in appropriate ways. This demand, coupled with an environment of increased standards and shrinking budgets, is a major challenge to rural, small, and low-income schools. This digest reviews contemporary research on resource…

This digest examines the problem of upgrading rural school facilities, focusing on specific rural issues, conditions that interfere with teaching and learning, and new funding approaches. Almost half of U.S. public schools are in rural areas and small towns. Close rural school-community relationships may make it easier to make decisions,…

Case studies of five small and isolated rural schools in the south-central United States examined their participation and success in the Comprehensive School Reform Demonstration (CSRD) program. The schools included three elementary schools and two K-12 unit schools serving 71-473 students. All were at least 50 miles from a metropolitan area and…

The federal Comprehensive School Reform Demonstration (CSRD) program provides incentives for high-poverty schools to pursue reform. In fiscal years 1998-99, $120 million, or 83 percent of total CSRD funds, was made available to states to target Title I schools serving disadvantaged students. Of the 1,748 schools participating in CSRD, over 85…

Recent debates focus on literacy curriculum as if it is separate from teachers' other work, almost at times as if teachers and their contexts are irrelevant to what is the most appropriate literacy pedagogy. Perhaps learning to read and write is not hard work, but teaching is, no matter which theoretical orientation about literacy is adhered to.…

This paper considers how Australian young people living in relative poverty, per se, are portrayed in media reports and how a specific group of socioeconomically disadvantaged young people are constituted in teachers' classroom talk. The paper begins with the examination of several newspaper reports, part of an archive of articles concerned with…

It is not news that managerial discourses have dominated government educational policy and programs in Australia since the mid 1980s. During this period there has also been a proliferation of discourses about literacy. The common sense view is that literacy empowers disadvantaged people and assists failing economies. The last decade and a half has…

Despite recurrent criticisms, the American public school system is not failing. Evidence suggests that youths are smarter and are achieving more than in the past. Articles from as early as 1909 offer criticisms of the schools that seem applicable today. Current reform proposals will exacerbate the differences between "have" and "have not" school…

A data from 1996,1998 and 1999 Minnesota comprehensive statewide testing on eight graders is used to analyze whether African American students perform worse than the white students who attend the poverty schools. The analyses conclude that African American-White test score gap is attributed more to the racial discriminations and racial treatments…

On October 21, 2006, more than 200 Washington National Board Certified Teachers[R] (NBCTs) assembled in Seattle to address the vexing problem of recruiting and retaining accomplished teachers for high-needs schools. Before the Summit, NBCT participants read a number of background papers and research summaries. At the Summit, they listened to the…

As the pressure grows for students to learn and know more, so grows the demand on schools to raise achievement. It is a huge challenge for the country---and for the schools in which teachers work. The public appetite for dramatic solutions is substantial. That appetite is being fed by a stream of unproven reform proposals that will do tremendous…

In 1986-87, the school board of the Austin Independent School District approved an assignment plan that returned most elementary students to their neighborhood schools and created 16 predominantly minority schools with many students from low-income families. To assure that these students received a quality education, a 5-year Plan for Educational…