Describes a study conducted at Dayton Catholic Elementary School in Ohio that asked parents why they sent their children to the school. Concludes that Dayton is popular because of its commitment to teaching a Catholic way of life and its responsiveness to family needs. (JDI)

Describes rural schooling issues and rural school reform that focuses on teaching national norms and values perceived as critical for successful participation in the national culture. Data collected from one Appalachia school system illustrate the cultural conflict with values of familism, place, tradition, and fundamentalism. (MMU)

Maintains that the studies presented in this collection combine cultural with political analyses to illuminate educational processes. Elaborates on the key constructs, including contextualization with agency, sociopolitical dynamics in designing school practices, and personal self-definition in relation to sociocultural context. (Author/KB)

Study investigated the relationships among neighborhood informal social control, crime, and negative peer culture; students' sense of school coherence; and students' educational behavior. Neighborhood crime had a substantial negative effect on their educational behavior that was not mediated by a sense of school coherence. Discusses implications…

Reports the prevalence of school-based after-school programs and discusses extracurricular activities, child care, extended-day programs, enrichment programs, and efforts to make the schools community hubs. Outlines implementation challenges to program expansion: governance, space, program quality, funding, and accountability. (SLD)

Written while the author was a high school senior, this piece discusses the value of the combination of emotional lessons, those in patience, appreciation and reflection, along with traditional school lessons in order to make an unbelievably educational and worthwhile adventure. (BF)

Many schools have responded to incidences of school violence by installing elaborate security hardware. This article focuses on a school that took a different approach. Students and staff at Chugiak High School chose to wage peace in the school and worked to reclaim their school as nonviolent, caring community. (BF)

In this carefully documented essay, Russell K. Nieli outlines the major transformation in American higher education that began at the end of the nineteenth century. Today's research- and vocation-driven private universities began as Christian institutions founded by zealous evangelizers, while public colleges embraced a watered-down version of the…

Students designated as English language learners (ELL) tend to go to public schools that have low standardized test scores. However, these low levels of assessed proficiency are not solely attributable to poor achievement by ELL students. These same schools report poor achievement by other major student groups as well, and have a set of…

It is often assumed that schools themselves play an important role in students not completing school. However, the literature is inconsistent on what school characteristics influence school leaving, and identified school effects may be spurious due to the absence, or poor measurement, of appropriate individual-level influences. The importance of…

Today, 10.6% of children enrolled in kindergarten through 12th grade in the U.S. are foreign-born, and 1 in 5 are children of immigrants. Public schools represent the setting where many of the acculturative struggles of immigrant children unfold, having traditionally served as a vehicle of socialization and "assimilation" of immigrants in the U.S.…

Data on the writing achievement of 11th-grade students in 1990 on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) may help answer the question of who is right: employers and educators who say students are poorly prepared in writing, or parents and students, who are more positive about the results of the writing preparation students receive…

This document presents findings of a commissioned survey that explored public attitudes toward a number of issues affecting K-12 education in Saskatchewan. Data were derived from telephone interviews with 708 individuals and focus-group interviews. Of the telephone sample, 54 percent had children attending school. Themes that emerged were…

This report presents nine case studies featuring efforts to foster community development through business incubation and entrepreneurial programs at two-year colleges. A background section discusses case description, and organization and format of case studies. The second section describes the case study design. Each case study is introduced with…

Education professionals are recognizing that the multiple and complex problems of children with emotional and behavioral difficulties and their families exceed the capacity of any single service system. The 13 articles in this edited collection present educators and social service practitioners with innovative programs and practices for such…