The history of federal support of supplementary education for low-achieving children in low-income neighborhoods demonstrates the positive, although not statistically significant, impact of Chapter 1 and the Hawkins Stafford amendments and predecessors. Issues that must be considered in reauthorizing Chapter 1 in 1993 are discussed. (SLD)

Teachers of low-achieving homogeneous, high-achieving homogeneous, and academically heterogeneous classes in elementary and junior high schools in Israel were interviewed to determine their allegiance to academic, personal, and social goals for students. In contrast to results of U.S. research, academic goals dominated for teachers in all…

Special needs teachers and subject teachers simplified text in British secondary level science and humanities courses and used the text with a class of mixed attainment groups. Subsequent assessment indicated that marks of higher achievers were consistently high and marks of low achievers were significantly improved compared to a control group.…

The effects of an intervention--Cognitive Strategy Instruction in Writing--to improve students' expository writing abilities was studied. The program emphasizes teacher and student dialogues about expository writing strategies, text structure processes, and self-regulated learning. Results of 183 fourth and fifth graders indicate that dialogic…

Examines students' (25 low achieving fourth graders) understanding of conceptual features of decimals. Assessment results indicated that students' thinking was influenced by the types of concrete materials used to represent decimals; that low achievers' understanding of some important properties of decimals increased; and that understanding grew…

Using interview data from 42 working, lower- and underclass African-American female college students, this article challenges the primacy of the cultural argument that educational failure of African-American women is primarily the result of their adherence to oppositional cultural forms and a preindustrial sense of time that inhibits success in…

Teacher unionization, centralization of financial control, desegregation, and weakening in business involvement are among the political factors that have contributed to the decline in public school performance between 1965 and 1980. Research into these factors confirms the importance of political influences on schooling and suggests that…

The relationships among student achievement, student culture, and educational practitioners' attitudes and expectations were investigated for 20 Mexican-American middle school students with the assistance of 12 teachers and 2 administrators. Findings indicate that these students, whether high or low achieving, perceived themselves, and were…

The "at-risk" designation attached to low-achieving children frequently sets them up for failure. Remedial programs are often ineffective, and skill drills rob students of in-context reading opportunities. Models like Success for All are so prescriptive that students cannot participate in open-ended discussions of literature. Unjust…

Critiquing Nina and Sol Horowitz's article advocating high-stakes tests, the author deplores deleterious effects of too-rigorous standards on poor students and recent immigrants. Without large-scale initiatives to affect their lives out of school, urban youngsters' prospects are dim. A National Research Council report offers testing guidelines.…

The authors investigated the relationship between student mobility and student performance and behavior. The authors used criterion-referenced test (CRT) and norm-referenced test (NRT) data indexes from the 1998-1999 school year. Results showed that as the mobility of students increased within the school year, their test performance on the CRT and…

Recent policy initiatives promoting high-stakes testing for graduation present a significant challenge to practitioners charged with educating students with high-incidence disabilities. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of test-taking strategy instruction on the test performance of secondary students with high-incidence…

This article explicates the Cultural Modeling Framework for designing robust learning environments that leverage everyday knowledge of culturally diverse students to support subject-matter-specific learning. It reports a study of Cultural Modeling in the teaching of response to literature in an urban underachieving high school serving…

Five hundred and thirty five Chilean schoolchildren were evaluated with a test-retest procedure using teacher and parent questionnaires in first and sixth grade, respectively, and a measure of self-esteem in sixth grade. According to teachers' ratings, disobedience/aggression, shyness and hyperactivity persisted. Crosspredictions were found:…

Children's lead and pesticide exposures are used as examples to examine social disparities in exposure reduction efforts as well as environmental policies impacting children in poverty and minority children. The review also presents an estimate of the effect of social disparities in lead exposure on standardized test performance. Because including…