Focuses on issues relevant to educating homeless adolescents, including barriers to education, historical trends in homelessness, and reasons adolescents become homeless. The unique problems of this group, such as victimization and street life, are discussed with implications for educators. Recommendations are made for program and policy in this…

Explores interconnected movements to restructure school-family and school-community relationships, focusing on increased parental involvement in school governance, instructional partnerships, school-to-community outreach, and children's service coordination. Emphasizes the national crisis in urban children's lives, complementary societal…

Discusses efforts to coordinate services (mental health services in particular) for children and families, and reports initial findings of research by the Youth Law Center to identify specific characteristics of effective coordination programs. Sixteen characteristics of effective coordinated service programs have been identified. (SLD)

The B. F. Day Elementary School in Seattle (Washington) exemplifies positive changes that can be made with principal leadership and teacher involvement. The school is one of six Seattle urban schools receiving federal and state support for educating homeless children under the McKinney Homeless Assistance Act. (SLD)

The Health Science and Technology Academy (HSTA), a partnership between West Virginia University and primarily rural communities in West Virginia, provides after-school science clubs for financially disadvantaged and minority students and encourages their interests in science, technology, and health science careers. Science teachers participating…

Ways in which urban schools respond to and are affected by the urban environment are explored through a case study analysis of a middle school in Oakland (California). As the only public agency charged with serving all young people, the urban school can play a leading role in urban revitalization. (SLD)

International early childhood research provides hard evidence of the value of preschool for disadvantaged children and for all children. Despite high cost-effectiveness and numerous educational and social benefits of preschool education, most North American governments have been resistant to paying for universal programs. (SAS)

In this article, the author takes an inside look at efforts in Worcester, Massachusetts to offer families the opportunities promised by the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). Worcester is the third largest school system in the state of Massachusetts, serving roughly 25,000 students in 46 public schools (36 elementary, 4 middle, 5 high, and one…

A developmental ecological model was used to identify child attributes, father characteristics, and familial factors associated with multidimensional father involvement with preschool children enrolled in Head Start. The relations between father involvement and children's school readiness were also investigated. Eighty-five African American…

Many community colleges have pursued aggressive initiatives to serve students on welfare, creating new academic programs or expanding existing ones. This chapter highlights case studies of best practices that illustrate how institutional initiatives targeting welfare students have resulted in an expanded capacity to educate and serve mainstream…

Pathways to Prevention is a developmental prevention project focused on the transition to school in a disadvantaged multicultural urban area in Queensland. The project incorporates two elements: The Preschool Intervention Program (PIP) promotes communication and social skills related to school success; and the Family Independence Program (FIP)…

This study examined a new screening tool (Get Ready to Read) for assessing early reading skills in 73 three-year-old and 79 four-year-old children from low-income families and relating performance to more extensive assessments of phonological sensitivity and language skills (vocabulary and print knowledge) that have been found to be related to the…

In her first year as superintendent of the Atlanta Public Schools, Beverly Hall encountered what she describes as the nearly universal disbelief that poor children of color can achieve high levels of learning. This chapter recounts how she confronted this and other obstacles and challenges as the new leader of the Atlanta Public Schools. Hall is…

This article unpacks the decision to decharter a successful urban middle school serving African American students, especially focusing on parental choice in a school caught between two urban reform initiatives: charter schooling and state takeovers of urban districts. Originally chartered by a university, DeCharter became a "school of choice" in…

This discussion of improving the values of youth focuses on school-business programs for disadvantaged students. Highlights include mentoring programs; a project in Boston, the Boston Compact, that provides jobs for students who graduate; and a review of business policies that encourage positive values among employees. (LRW)