Since the mid-1990s, government policies in the USA, Canada, England, and Australia have promoted the need to produce an ICT skilled workforce in order to ensure national competitiveness in globalised economic conditions. In this article, we examine the ways in which these policy intentions in 1 state in Australia were translated into a…

This article investigates the contribution skills development can make in promoting South Africa's wider socio-economic development. It provides a broad overview of the emerging gap between those who are benefiting from South Africa's transition to democracy and those who are not. Overcoming these worsening social conditions has become a major…

This study examined whether the impact of contextual-level socioeconomic disadvantage on adolescent mental health is contingent upon individual-level perceptions of social support. Data are from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), a panel survey of a nationally representative United States sample (analytic N =…

This article describes how Everyday Mathematics, a new program that is being used for kids at all levels across the US, is now a part of a curriculum change in the New York City school system. Instead of teaching standard ways to perform addition, subtraction, multiplication, and long division and then drilling students with worksheets, teachers…

Of all of the medical specialties, child and adolescent psychiatry has the most severe shortage of practitioners. This shortage is even more pronounced in economically disadvantaged and rural areas. The American Indian population is younger, more economically disadvantaged, and more rural than the general U.S. population (United States Census…

This article looks at the important role that teachers and headteachers can have as role models for children living with challenging circumstances. It focuses particularly on girls struggling against the odds to complete their education in Ugandan schools and improve their life chances. The commitment to women's rights espoused by Uganda's…

In the educational finance litigation context, recent actions have been premised on the argument that the aid distribution system is fiscally inadequate, thus drawing attention away from a concern for equity. The financing of public education in North Carolina and the constitutional provisions undergirding the same have been the subject of…

Researchers conducted focus groups in three Minnesota Head Start programs that provide full-day services. The purpose of this descriptive study was to understand how these programs operated, the strengths and challenges of full-day Head Start programs, and how working parents and those on public assistance described these services. Findings…

This paper presents the eighth-grade students--Misha, Ashley, Tandie, and Henrietta--in Mrs. Olen's math class in a high-poverty school, who work with members of a local nonprofit organization to collaboratively create a multi-textual, digital project on poverty and its connections to homelessness. The focal project on problems and solutions…

Background: Cross-cultural research on minority school achievement yields mixed findings on the motivational impact of future goal setting for students from disadvantaged minority groups. Relevant and recent motivational research, integrating Future Time Perspective Theory with Self-Determination Theory, has not yet been validated among minority…

In 2007, the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future (NCTAF) completed an 18-month study of the costs of teacher turnover in five school districts. The selected districts varied in size, location, and demographics enabling exploration of how these variations affected costs. Costs of recruiting, hiring, processing, and training…

Data collected by the Massachusetts Department of Education (Department) during the 2005 Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) suggest that, despite significant efforts to identify homeless students, many are going undetected by their schools. Since the reauthorization of the McKinney Vento Homeless Assistance Education Improvement Act under the No…

On January 23, 2004, President Bush signed the DC School Choice Incentive Act into law. This landmark piece of legislation included $14 million in funding for what would come to be called the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP). The OSP is the first federally funded K-12 scholarship program in the country and is designed to provide…

"Globalized E-Learning Cultural Challenges" explores the issues educators, administrators, and instructional designers face when transferring knowledge and skills to other cultures through e-learning. Most e-learning courses have been designed in Western cultures, but the largest and fastest-growing consumer groups live in Eastern…

This issue brief focuses on the special needs of teenage parents and their children ("teen parent families") and on how the unique set of services available through Early Head Start (EHS) programs can support them. Teen parent families face multiple risks, risks that may be substantially different from those faced by families with older parents…