Background: Schools in K-12 have generated mission statements as ways of focusing their efforts and energies in specific areas. These mission statements vary by institutional setting as a function of the stakeholders and constituent groups who facilitate their development. To date, no studies were located in which the mission statements of…

This article presents questions regarding the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) regulations and the No Child Left Behind Act. The author's answers to these questions are presented.

Fostering Healthy Futures (FHF) is a randomized, controlled trial of an innovative preventive intervention for preadolescent youth (ages 9-11) placed in out-of-home care. The program is designed to promote child well-being by identifying and addressing mental health issues, preventing adolescent risk behaviors, and promoting competence. This paper…

Using Ariadne's thread in the narrative of the labyrinth as a metaphor for the elusiveness of language, this paper explores the concept of "self" to prepare for the discussion of autobiography as a "tool" for teaching writing, and to create a connection between a politically enabled self, a private self, and critical theory.…

This paper examines the teacher's role in elementary and secondary school writing workshops--the teacher as Dostoevskian novelist creates a classroom novel and takes up relations with student-characters. The paper focuses on: the rejection of traditional relations among novelist and character, teacher and student, and the embrace of new ones; how…

This final report describes the activities of Project LEEDS (Leadership Education to Empower Disabled Students), a federally supported project designed to create student/staff teams from colleges and universities to encourage undergraduate/graduate students with disabilities to become leaders, through development of self-identity and identity with…

Preparing educators for the challenges of an empowered school community demands collaboration among teacher educators, practitioners, and the community. This paper proposes a theoretical model of empowerment which supports university-school-community ventures. The model, which embraces intra-university collaboration and university-school-community…

Whole language, a theory of language instruction that was developed primarily in terms of helping children learn to read, has now been extended to middle- and secondary-school levels. Andragogy, the learning of adults, is a specific theory of adult education, conceived in contradistinction to pedagogy, the teaching of children. When these two…

In 1990, Georgia's DeKalb College initiated a program of date rape prevention (DRP) workshops in response to statistics that show: (1) over 50% of all entering freshmen and 55% of all women are enrolled in community, technical, and junior colleges; and (2) 50% of rape victims will know the perpetrator. The workshop initiative sought to raise…

Until recently in Egyptian society, girls--from the point when their schooling ends to marriage--existed in a social void. In Maqattam, the situation is changing as a unique intervention has begun to define alternative expectations and opportunities for adolescent girls, providing them with a bridge between childhood and marriage and childbearing.…

This paper presents guidelines for creating a collaborative approach for communication among teachers, parents, and students to plan for their transition toward further education or work in adult life and to become informed self-advocates. Guidelines for teachers are presented and include: (1) establishing a system that places the student at the…

Being "good enough" is no longer adequate for today's library and staff. Total Quality Management (TQM) is a system and philosophy which guides a unified effort towards delivering excellent goods and services. In this video, not available at ERIC, Connie Merritt shows how TQM helps all of a library's departments work together to satisfy…

A project called the "Tesosros" (Treasures) Literacy Project matched six Spanish-speaking ESL (English as a Second Language) students, working collaboratively, with an equal number of "at risk" Anglo counterparts from a regular section of grade 11 American Literature at a high school in southeast Michigan. Students came…

In some educational systems, legislative action mandates teacher participation in decision making through the formation of policymaking bodies such as school councils. This paper presents findings of a study that investigated high school teachers' perceptions of empowerment in schools with and without school councils. The study investigated…

A middle school teacher with both English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) and mainstream students in her class attempted to foster learning independence by encouraging self-evaluation and examination of the learning process. Initially, this involved providing them with rubrics and checklists for assessing work on several assignments. A second step was…