The rationale for taking bold action on the nation's persistently failing schools can be summed up in one dramatic and disturbing statistic: half of the young Americans who drop out of high school attend just 12 percent of the nation's schools. Ending the cycle of failure at schools is a daunting challenge and a surprisingly controversial one.…

Teacher shortages are essentially a problem of distribution (Darling-Hammond, 2001; Ingersoll, 2001; National Association of State Boards of Education, 1998; Olson, 2000; Reeves, 2003; Voke, 2002). According to recent studies, hardest to find are teachers who are both qualified and willing to teach in hard-to-staff schools, which included those in…

In this paper, the authors use data from interviews and observations in four urban elementary schools, two high and two low performing, to examine how schools respond to high stakes accountability policies. The authors argue that school responses to high stakes accountability depend on school context. In low performing schools, responses focus…

This report analyzes the longitudinal effects of schoolwide Chapter 1 initiatives on student reading achievement in 40 elementary schools in a large urban school district. The analyses find that, compared to control students, first-graders in schoolwide projects showed no achievement effects, second-graders showed positive significant effects,…

Introduces an issue devoted to the Schools Reaching Out projects at David A. Ellis School in Roxbury (MA) and Adolph S. Ochs School in New York City. Projects attempt to link the schools with parents and their communities to promote the students' academic and social success. (DM)

Personality type concepts have been introduced at Anwatin Middle School, an urban middle school in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where nearly two-thirds of the students receive reduced price or free lunches. In Anwatin's diverse climate--approximately 70% of Anwatin's students are students of color, mostly Black and Hmong--looking at personality…

Channel One, an in-school television program, provides a centrally prepared, 10-minute daily newscast accompanied by 2 minutes of commercials. Several states ban Channel One because of concerns about providing advertisers such direct access to students within the walls of tax-supported public school buildings. This paper examines what kinds of…

This paper examines the lack of familiarity that teachers and administrators have with the communities in which low-income students live and stresses the need to create linkages between the school and the outside world to help at-risk students succeed academically. There is a serious flaw in most community-oriented approaches and many contemporary…

Six school-based improvement programs distributed throughout the United States were studied in order to determine how effective these plans have been and what factors help or hinder them. The programs studied shared three central features: 1) focus on the school as a whole; 2) involvement of teachers in designing improvements; and 3) incorporation…