In this policy brief, the author contends that there are four other principal causes of the collective poor showing on reaching state equity goals in the United States. These are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in the school finance world. The first horseman rides an economic horse, the second a sociological horse, the third a political horse,…

Act 49 of 1987 requires the Secretary of Education to provide the General Assembly with an annual report on public school dropouts in Pennsylvania. The purpose of this report is to document the actual number of students who drop out each year and to provide various characteristics about these students. The type of data collected about each dropout…

In September 2005 the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) in association with the Department for Education and Skills (DfES), the Sutton Trust and the College Board, began a five-year research study to examine the validity of an aptitude test in higher education admissions. This report describes and explores the relationships…

Due to the increasing complexity in the financial aid process and the movement of available financial aid up the economic scale, poor people and minorities have less access to college, including engineering programs. Some impediments are lack of access to knowledge about college, increasing complexity and up-front costs in the application process…

Students designated as English language learners (ELL) tend to go to public schools that have low standardized test scores. However, these low levels of assessed proficiency are not solely attributable to poor achievement by ELL students. These same schools report poor achievement by other major student groups as well, and have a set of…

Attendance in preschool centers can yield short-term benefits for children from poor or middle-class families. Yet debate persists in Europe and the United States over whether centers yield gains of sufficient magnitude to sustain children's cognitive or social advantages as they move through primary school. We report on child care and home…

The Subcommittee on Human Resources of the House Committee on Ways and Means asked the General Accounting Office for information on who is currently receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and whether the characteristics of this population have changed in recent years. This report presents information from 1976 to 1992 about women…

The United States blood plasma industry uses various rhetorics to access donors and markets its products while managing its stigma and potential legal liability. The industry includes both the public "nonprofit" sector and the private, for-profit blood collection and manufacturing businesses owned by pharmaceutical companies that rely on…

A study examined factors associated with achievement for African-American eighth graders and whether differences existed relative to poverty status and depth of poverty. Data were extracted from the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988. An independent data set of 3,009 students was created including information for students identifying…

In response to the Stewart B. McKinney Homeless Assistance Act and its amendments, most urban schools have created special programs for homeless students to help them succeed academically and to offer them access to social services and a safe and stress-free environment. Recruitment, enrollment, and service coordination policies are adapted to the…

A study investigated access to books for children in schools that described their literacy curriculum as "literature-based." Six schools that served economically disadvantaged children exhibited a wide variation in the number of books available in both school libraries and classrooms. Two of the schools depict the influences on children's access…

Although the problems of high-risk youth are well known and raise widespread concern, few alternative educations exist to help troubled youth who are poor. This book describes various peer-group programs to rehabilitate high-risk youth. Following the introduction, chapter 1 describes the goals, stages, and techniques of peer-group programs.…

Education researchers have moved beyond asking whether money matters to school performance. They are now investigating how money matters to student learning and achievement. There are three questions that policymakers and citizens must address: How much money are they willing to spend on the education of the young? How should it be fairly spent?…

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 paper presents findings from a 5-year research project involving 50 primarily rural families with infants identified neonatally in birth crisis, or shortly thereafter, as having developmental disabilities. Parents were interviewed to gather information on their perceptions of and experiences with the early intervention (EI) process.…