This document reports on a survey administered at Santa Barbara City College (California) to determine the effectiveness of its English basic skills classes. The survey was also designed to explore the intention of students taking these courses to continue in the course sequence, as well as discover the students' current and future educational…

Few colleges of education include theory and practice about the need to nurture resilient teacher leaders. This issue should be addressed in order to improve the preparation and continued development of the nation's teachers, particularly those in urban schools. This newsletter suggests that as problems confronting schools, particularly urban…

This paper reports that black male students enrolled in Texas community colleges generally have a lower rate of degree completion than that of their white counterparts. However, some institutions have higher rates of black male graduation than do others. The purposes of this study were to ascertain which Texas public community colleges have been…

The authors of this report, education researchers and reformers, value both the promise and possibilities of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), with its mandate that states ensure a "highly qualified" teacher for every child in every core academic class. Reports by the Education Trust, the Center for Education Policy, and the Center…

The consequences of not graduating from high school are increasingly serious for both individuals and society as a whole. As a result, state and federal accountability systems now require reporting of more detailed graduation and dropout data. The federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) requires states to report disaggregated…

Nationwide, public attention has increasingly focused on the need for a variety of early care and education arrangements to meet the changing needs of families. The demand for early care and education has grown for families from all socioeconomic sectors, intensifying as participants in welfare-to-work programs enter the workforce, and as work…

While educational results have improved in many areas, a high percentage of North Carolina students are not graduating from high school, raising concerns about the state's ability to be economically competitive with other states and countries. All students need to attain the knowledge and skills necessary to be competitive and prosperous in the…

This digest examines the rural teacher shortage from a policy perspective and suggests strategies to address the problem. The rural teacher recruitment and retention problem varies across states. An adequate number of teachers are trained each year nationwide, but the problem is with distribution. Recent research on rural teacher recruitment and…

This Northern Virginia Community College (NVCC) report examines patterns of fall to spring retention rates of first-time students. The report is divided into five sections: (1) retention rates analyzed by students' educational objectives; (2) retention rates by program placement and award type; (3) retention rates of three cohorts of students:…

The Faculty Mentoring Program (FMP) at California State University, Dominguez Hills, provides faculty mentors to students defined as "at-risk." FMP aims to encourage faculty-student interaction through a mentoring relationship that will lead to improved student achievement, retention, and graduation and to better faculty understanding of…

This study addressed a void in the current literature by identifying and describing positive and negative influences on the persistence in school of African American students attending a private black college (PBC). Four students participated in the study: four males and one female. There were six formal interviews in all, with each subject…

This report examines new students enrolled in credit courses in the fall 1998 semester at City College of San Francisco, measuring student success in fall 1998 and re-enrollment in spring 1999. The sample consists first of all new students, and then students categorized by their educational origin, the number of matriculation services received,…

This qualitative dissertation examines the survival strategies of African-American women attending a community college. It identifies specific intervention strategies that will improve the quality of such women's collegiate experience and will facilitate persistence. A portraiture research methodology was used to collect data on 10 participants…

This is Rio Hondo College's (California) institutional report on the retention and graduation behavior of the fall 1995 new student cohort. These students were tracked through 2001 using a longitudinal student-tracking database. The report presents information concerning the assorted variables associated with term-to-term persistence and associate…

This paper asserts that the concept of teachers' vision (teachers' images of their ideal classroom practices) may provide a particularly powerful way of understanding variations in teachers' experiences and dealing with prospective teachers' experiences of "reality shock" or disillusionment when entering the profession. It proposes that…