Opportunities to interact with their school-aged peers gives young people an avenue for learning the social skills necessary to build healthy relationships, to interact at an acceptable level in a group structure and respect for the individual differences of others around them. These skills take on a greater importance after high school due to …

"Straight A's: Public Education Policy and Progress" is a biweekly newsletter that focuses on education news and events both in Washington, DC and around the country. The following articles are included in this issue: (1) Preparing, Recruiting, and Retaining Education Professionals: Senator Reed Proposes New $500 Million Bill to Improve…

This paper asserts that central to the debate over excellence and equity in education is the shifting nature of authority over public education in the schools and school districts of Greater Boston, Massachusetts, noting that the autonomy that local school districts have historically exercised is fading, if not gone. The 1993 Massachusetts…

This report examines the impact of teacher quality on student achievement in Canada, analyzing current research, practices, and innovations to provide a better understanding of the complexity of teaching and effective teacher deployment. The nine chapters focus on: (1) "Introduction"; (2) "Indicators of Teacher Quality" (defining teacher quality…

This education plan sets out a vision for instruction and school development so that Chicago Public Schools, Illinois, can become the premier urban school district in the United States. It represents a year of planning and program development in the areas of human capital, professional development, the Chicago Reading Initiative, the redesign of…

This collection of papers describes the process of creating a standards-based teacher education program through strong collaboration among arts and science, education, and P-12 faculty members and administrators. The Standards-based Teacher Education Project (STEP) was designed to help teacher education programs ensure that their graduates know…

As part of the graduate teacher licensure program at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, candidates are required to complete an action research project during a course that coincides with the student teaching experience. The syllabus for the course, "Education 590 Culminating Experience," is included, followed by action research projects…

A long-standing dilemma in career and technical education (CTE) has been the best way to train new teachers. Recent literature reviews by Bruening et al. (2001) and Gray and Walter (2001) provide overviews of current CTE teacher education programs and CTE teacher licensing and preparation. Some of their findings include a trend toward more…

What students do in college matters as much as anything else in terms of their educational success. Educationally effective colleges and universities - those that add value to the student experience - intentionally craft policies and practices that channel students' energy to the activities that matter to student learning. Students who…

This study was designed to explore the ways in which preservice teachers' reflective judgment levels influenced their perceptions of and decisions about complex and ill-defined dilemmas they encountered in their field placement classrooms. Participants were ten traditional-aged juniors in a college teacher preparation program who were completing a…

Choosing Higher Options in Community Education (CHOICE) Alternative School is devoted to professional development. This report documents the need for and planning of sustained and supported professional development for 4 staff members at the CHOICE Alternative School in Jamestown, New York. There was no focused plan or vision for staff development…

In 2000, the National Education Goals Panel examined the conditions that help ensure school success, conducting a series of four field hearings nationwide to find evidence of success and to understand why schools were succeeding. Participants at the hearings included students, teachers, parents, principals, superintendents, university presidents,…

This annual report features national data on academic progress in U.S. public schools, showing student achievement and opportunity patterns from kindergarten through college, by race, ethnicity and family income. It focuses on academic achievement (reading performance on the most recent adminstration of the National Asssessment of Educational…

This paper presents proceedings from a 2001 working conference of the State and District Support to Low-Performing Schools initiative, which presented research-based strategies and exemplary practice to improve low-performing schools. The presentations focused on state and district systems of support to low-performing schools; use of data to…

This report compares Oregon's reading and mathematics performance on the most recent administrations of the state assessment with performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). To indicate how Oregon is doing in narrowing the academic achievement gap between African American and Latino students and their white, middle class…