Since the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation, education policy makers have focused on students at the lower end of the achievement spectrum, specifically those struggling to meet standards, particularly in reading and mathematics. However, those who are considered gifted have been increasingly underserved, at the expense of high ability…

Educators and policymakers who share the goal of equal opportunity in schools often hold differing notions of what entails a just school in multicultural America. Some emphasize the importance of integration and uniform treatment for all, while others point to the benefits of honoring cultural diversity in ways that make minority students feel at…

Online learning programs are designed to expand high-quality educational opportunities and to meet the needs of diverse students. While the primary reason online courses are offered in school districts is to expand offerings to courses that would otherwise be unavailable, the second most commonly cited reason for offering online learning is to…

While almost any educator would agree that students deserve access to equal educational opportunities, many schools still sort students based on test scores or other criteria. There's a better way: one built on offering all students access to the best curriculum. In this first-ever practical book that shows how educators can make detracking work,…

Preadolescent students are interested in learning the structure and function of the human body. However, their teachers are not trained in this content. The purpose of this project was to expand a successful outreach effort in the health sciences for grade 7-12 teachers to include PreK-3 teachers. A "Healthy Hearts" workshop was offered to train…

Background/Context: Studies carried out over the last two decades have established structured after-school programs as significant contexts for adolescent development. Recent large-scale evaluations of after-school initiatives have yielded mixed results, finding some impact on adolescents' attitudes toward school but limited impact on their…

Assessment is generally seen as one of the key challenges in the field of self-access learning (Gardner & Miller, 1999; Champagne et al., 2001; Lai, 2001; Kinoshita Thomson, 1996). Many researchers and practitioners point to difficulties with assessing language gains in an environment in which variables cannot comprehensively be controlled…

"Still Not Equal: Expanding Educational Opportunity in Society" addresses the successes and failures of "Brown v. Board of Education" and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as well as the continuing challenge of expanding educational opportunity in the United States and across the Black diaspora. The educational, political, and social influence…

The vast majority of American-born adults are exposed to written language from a very early age. Most Americans live in a print-based society where letters and words are everywhere! Drive, walk, or bike down any American street and you will see numerous eye-catching billboards, signs, and storefronts. Our towns, cities, neighborhoods, and homes…

In 2001, the Baltimore City Public School System (BCPSS) released its blueprint for reforming the city's high schools. Central to the blueprint were plans to create eight innovation high schools and to convert all nine large, comprehensive high schools into smaller neighborhood schools. Since May 2003, the Urban Institute has been conducting a…

The Virginia Tidewater Consortium's effort to reach out to the community began twenty-seven years ago when it received an Educational Opportunity Center (EOC) grant from the U.S. Department of Education. The EOC was specifically designed to work with adults from low socioeconomic backgrounds, most of them minorities. In southeastern Virginia,…

Faculty learning communities (FLC) provide opportunities for professional development and personal growth within university settings. Some FLC are structured; others are unstructured. Faculty at a mid-sized Midwestern state university were asked a series of close- and open-ended questions that examined the reasons for and benefits from their…

California and the rest of the United Sates are undergoing significant challenges in providing educational opportunities for an increasingly diverse population. These challenges include inadequate literacy and numeracy skills among large segments of the student and adult populations; an ongoing shift in the demographic profile of the population,…

The Constitution provides the ground rules to create obligations on the state and to transform the education system by introducing human rights in line with the best developed democracies. This article is not about state-compelled school attendance, but rather the observe: the right to attend school. So while the right to attend school is part of…

The Academy for Teacher Excellence (ATE) at the University of Texas at San Antonio and San Antonio College is proposed as a comprehensive model whose overarching goals include: (1) creating a learning ecology that values diversity and prepares teacher candidates for work in diverse communities; (2) increasing the number of Latino students pursuing…