The confluence of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) with the development of China's education is not a mere chance encounter. On August 27, 2004, the author took part in the designing of a meeting held in Beijing by the Twenty First Century Education Salon that received support from the Ford Foundation. Jointly organized by the Twenty-first…

There's parent involvement and then there's parent involvement. There's the kind that has parents volunteering their time in schools, making costumes, or organizing and staffing the school carnival fund-raiser. This is helpful activity by any measure--helpful in the service of kids and not to be minimized. But there are other levels of involvement…

Using a case example of one of the mental health agencies in Florida, we demonstrate the utility of concept mapping for developing a program logic model and articulating a program theory for program assessment. The results of the concept mapping procedure enabled identification of 100 program services as described in statements by staff. Moreover,…

Violence and alienation are common occurrences in the lives of many young people today. This article presents an overview of the work of the International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution (ICCCR) at Teachers College, Columbia University, which is aimed at helping individuals, schools, communities, businesses, and governments better…

The Regulations.gov Online Rulemaking Project is 1 of the 24 e-Government Initiatives on the President's Management Agenda (PMA), which was announced by the White House in 2001. The Regulations.gov Web site is the central electronic rulemaking portal for the federal government. Through a single Web site, citizens can search, view, and comment on…

Support for children and young people who experience violence, both directly and indirectly, is the principal focus of Martin Murphy's and David Stewart's article. Describing the work of the NOVA organisation, they highlight the benefits of close, interagency collaboration, with an emphasis upon therapeutic support and community capacity building.

This paper shows how the Delphi technique was used to conceptualize and operationalize local planning agency power. In the first of two Delphi studies, twelve scholars suggested four dimensions of agency power: legal authority, degree of control, relative autonomy, and capacity. In the second Delphi study, sixteen professional planners…

According to a 2001 study by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development about 3 in 10 children are affected as bully, victim, or both. However, the knowledge base pertaining to the relationship between bullying and students with disabilities is relatively new and somewhat sparse. This paper defines the terms bully and bullying…

In this paper I describe how self-advocacy has grown in the Czech Republic. First, I talk about how services for people with learning disabilities have begun to change in the last few years. This is because voluntary groups have lobbied and campaigned for change. I learned about self-advocacy during a visit to the UK in the 1990s. I went back to…

In the past twenty-five years, the Ministry of Education of the Republic of China and relevant departments have formulated a total of more than 400 documents with regard to the selection and sending of personnel for studies abroad, management abroad, work after returning to China, serving the country, convenience in entering and exiting China's…

How is it that you can do human-subject research without ever seeing, touching, or talking to another human being? If you cannot answer that riddle, you could conduct an entire research project and be forbidden to publish the results. Young investigators may throw up their hands when faced by this maze of approval processes. How can an institution…

This volume presents briefing papers presented at the 12th annual National Indian Education Association (NIEA) Summit. The following papers are included: (1) 2009 Budget and Past Funding Levels for Native Education; (2) NIEA Appropriations Priorities for FY 2009 and FY 2010; (3) American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009; (4) National Indian…

Since the first child care Quality Rating System (QRS) was implemented in Oklahoma 11 years ago (in 1998), 16 additional statewide systems have been launched and numerous states are piloting or developing a QRS (Zaslow, Tout, & Martinez-Beck, forthcoming). As QRS stakeholders across the nation look ahead to the next decade, it is important to take…

This issue of "The Link" newsletter contains the following articles: (1) Understanding the Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children (Lisa Goldblatt Grace); (2) Native American Juvenile Rights: Who Cares? (Terry L. Cross and Kathleen A. Fox); and (3) Strong Juvenile Justice Legislation Passes Senate Committee: Includes Expanded Coordination of…

Ten parallel human service agencies (five urban and five rural) were compared to identify variations in the service delivery system and to compare the costs of service provision. The agencies responded to approximately 36 questions covering eight major areas and were compared and contrasted, urban versus rural, according to the type of agency. All…