The research problem is: Many parents are not involved in their children's early literacy education. Some Head Start parents experience issues that keep them from teaching their children early literacy skills. The research questions were: What are the factors for parental involvement in the support of early literacy skill development for their…

What is school reform? What makes it sustainable? Who needs to be involved? How is scaling up achieved? This book is about the need for educational reforms that have built into them, from the outset, those elements that will see them sustained in the original sites and spread to others. Using the Te Kotahitanga Project as a model the authors…

Discontent with failed, top-down reform and the immediate prospect of political change have created a rare opportunity to reinvent education policy and to think afresh about how teachers and children should be encouraged to develop their full potential. "The Pendulum Swings" explores alternative, genuinely transformative conceptions of…

Nationalism presents significant challenges to intercultural competence instruction. On the one hand, nationalism promotes the compartmentalization of communities into mutually-exclusive and discretely-defined nationalist entities. In complementary fashion, nationalism also advocates the homogenization of cultural and linguistic practices within…

Based on data from the Longitudinal Study of American Youth (LSAY), students were classified into high-, middle-, and low-ability students. The effects of early acceleration in mathematics on the most advanced mathematics coursework (precalculus and calculus) in high school were examined in each category. Results showed that although early…

Researchers are increasingly recognizing space as a key axis of inequality. Scholars concerned with spatial inequality have called for special attention to issues of comparative advantage and disadvantage across space as well as the consideration of the subnational scale. This study draws on these ideas by examining the relationship between work…

Analysis of the National Education Longitudinal Study revealed that socioeconomically advantaged students persist in high school math at higher rates than their disadvantaged peers even when they have the same initial placements and skill levels. These disparities are larger among students with prior records of low academic status because students…

It's true that each school and each classroom presents its own unique challenges. But Kevin Mixon--who in October traded his instrumental music instructor duties at Blodgett School on the west side of Syracuse, New York, for a job as fine arts coordinator for Syracuse City Schools--knows from experience that some schools are far more challenging…

Absent from the literature on mayoral control of urban public schools are quantitative studies that create a coherent theory of why mayoral control occurs. This article attempts to fill this gap by analyzing 47 urban school districts from 1991 to 2002, using a Cox Proportional Hazards model to assess the effects of political, economic, and…

Thousands of children are living in stressful and dysfunctional situations. Scores of them reside in conditions replete with drugs or alcohol. As a court appointed special advocate (CASA), this author has advocated for children who have been abused or neglected and whose situations are involved in the courts, more specifically in the dependency…

Talk of "turning around" troubled schools has become synonymous with firing educators, but a nonprofit organization in Chicago with a successful track record takes a different approach. In 2006, Strategic Learning Initiatives (SLI) signed a contract with the Chicago public schools to help 10 schools serving grades K-8. More than 95…

A need to better understand the multidimensional nature of disadvantage is leading to the adoption of a wider range of measurement variables. One variable now commonly adopted is zero car ownership. This paper challenges the logic of including "not having a car" as an indicator of disadvantage. It argues that this can distort the real picture of…

A life sciences undergraduate apprenticeship initiative was run during the vacations at a South African university. In particular, the initiative aimed to increase the number of students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Annually 12-18 undergraduate biology students were apprenticed to various institutions during the January and July vacations from…

This article explores the role of Pell grants in the rise of for-profit colleges and universities (FPCUs) in the United States by examining National Center for Education Statistics data (Pell are financial "needs-based" grants to students to offset cost of tuition; Pell grants are the main source of federal financial support available to…

Narration, or storytelling, is an important aspect of language. Narrative skills have academic and social importance. This study evaluated the effects of a narrative intervention on story retelling and personal story generation skills of preschoolers with risk factors and narrative language delays. Narrative intervention was delivered in a small…