Kids Count is a national and state-by-state effort to track the status of children in the United States. By providing policy-makers and citizens with benchmarks of child well-being, the project attempts to enrich discussions about ways to secure better futures for all children. This year's data book, the sixth annual edition, places a special…

This digest examines the interdependence of schooling, work, and family in the lives of Mexican American women. Mexican Americans have lower educational achievement than other Hispanic subgroups and the total U.S. population, although females do somewhat better than males. Hispanic students are overrepresented in classes for special education,…

This paper presents a description of a northern Florida middle school and of the students enrolled in the school, 92% of whom are African-American. Three quarters of the entire student population is eligible for free or reduced price government assisted lunches. This figure is double the state average. During academic year 1991-92, expenditure per…

This paper examines the School Culture Survey developed by J. Saphier and M. King (1985) and its association with school and teacher characteristics. The research was conducted in the context of a Department of Education Fund for Innovation in Education grant to a large school district in the western United States. Participants were 27 principals…

Approximately 45% of first-time undergraduates in the United States attend public two-year colleges. These institutions serve many purposes, providing vocational training, offering an inexpensive method of completing lower division requirements before transferring to a four-year institution, and meeting avocational interests. According to United…

This study compared the development of storybook reading in 15 kindergartners from working class homes to that of kindergartners from middle class homes studied by Sulzby (1985). Nine girls and six boys from two kindergartens in a small, rural town in British Columbia, Canada, participated. Kindergarten teachers used a holistic approach to…

This paper, building on information from Portsmouth, Blackpool, and other coastal England towns with transient populations, summarizes data on four theorized indicators of social and economic deprivation that affect families with school-age children. The four indicators measured disruption, housing, family status, and neighborhood. Methods…

This report examines how students choose colleges and how the college choices of students differ by race and ethnicity across four subgroups of students: African American, Asian American, Chicano, and Caucasian. It is proposed that students conceptualize their college choices differently based on how they perceive their anticipated college…

This essay provides teachers and others with an awareness of the social and political implications of words used to designate indigenous peoples of North America. How a group is seen by others and how it sees itself in many ways define the conditions under which the group will live, and the options it can exercise to affect these conditions. The…

This paper presents findings of a study that examined the effect of British parents' social class on their ability to intervene in their children's schooling and to participate as "active consumers." In this case study of one school in England, data were derived from a questionnaire mailed to 491 parents of pupils in years 7, 9, and 11;…

School counselors refer to themselves as professionals who provide services to clients. Nonetheless, a critical examination of perceptions and roles is necessary before this assertion can be accepted. The purpose of this study is twofold: (1) to examine the extent to which school counseling in Queensland, Australia is considered a profession, and…

This study examined participation in high school and intercollegiate varsity athletics by following a cohort of 8th-graders through high school and the first 2 years of college. Data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 were used to track all 1988 8th-graders through 2 years after scheduled high school graduation, all 1988…

The 1992 National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS) examined three types of literacy--prose, document, and quantitative--among the entire older adult population and various subgroups thereof. Of the nationally representative sample of 26,091 adults interviewed during the NALS, 2,267 were aged 60-69, 1,005 were aged 70-79, and 442 were at least 80 years…

Suggesting that U.S. society is an adversarial one that makes sure that certain groups of people fail, this paper explores the ascription of failure in the adversarial contexts of the family, the school, and the workplace. The paper argues that if Americans continue to ascribe pariah status to large segments of the society, then the United States…

The education-production function has become the dominant paradigm for analyzing the effects of education resources on student outcomes. This paper presents findings of a study that investigated the education-production function and its relationship to educational policymaking. Fiscal data and student-achievement test scores for Indiana during the…