Parental involvement is a factor in student achievement. Low parental engagement at home and school has created a problem in an urban elementary school. Guided by Epstein's 6 types of parental involvement, the purpose of this case study was to examine and describe the perspectives of 17 parents of K-2 students in an urban school in Michigan. Few…

In 1996 President Clinton established the America Reads Challenge Act (1997), which included a commitment that every child will read independently and well by the end of third grade. This initiative was predicated on links between achievement and poverty (Riley, 1996, 2002) and that children reading below grade level in the early grades perform…

Charter school administrators weathered start-up woes, among them challenging students with unmet needs, verbal assaults, dwindling student enrollment, and a first-year budget deficit exceeding $200,000 to implement a reading improvement strategy that holds promise for helping at-risk students read better, a point particularly underscored…

The Detroit Public Schools (DPS) have been battered by substantial outside forces over the last decade. The school system was taken over by the state; its elected school board was dissolved and replaced by an appointed body; its many operating systems were privatized; its citizenry were encouraged to flee to charter schools; and its resources have…

The art of spoken word has captured youthful spirits all over the country, especially in heterogeneous urban centers. In this essay, the author opens up for re-consideration a central issue in language arts education, one suggested by the very writing of spoken word: how educators think about the relationship between oral and written language and…