This article features the "Barber School of the Gifted and Talented" in Highland Park, Michigan. The school is located in a tiny 2.96 square-mile, economically challenged city--very challenged--completely surrounded by Detroit's 143 square miles and its almost one million people. It is one of five schools in Highland Park--one preK-5 and…

Learning communities are a growing tool in use at colleges and universities around the country. In large part, these communities have been created in the hope that they will increase interaction among students and teach them to apply knowledge in meaningful ways. In addition to generating student interaction, learning communities should strive to…

This highly acclaimed volume in the "Defending Public Schools" series is now available in paperback from Teachers College Press. It is a practical, necessary addition to the work of administrators, teachers, policymakers, and parents as they negotiate the difficult path of how to best teach and educate today's children and youth. This…

What teaching practices foster inquiry and promote students to learn challenging subject matter in urban schools? Inquiry-based instruction and successful inquiry learning and teaching in project-based science (PBS) were described in previous studies (Brown & Campione, [1990]; Crawford, [1999]; Krajcik, Blumenfeld, Marx, Bass, & Fredricks,…

Urban schools across the United States face a pervasive problem in their science and mathematics programs-a disproportionate number of the teachers in these classrooms are not certified, thus making them underqualified to teach these subject areas. Furthermore, urban schools deal with teacher shortages and attrition in these critical areas. The…