Drawing upon an ongoing school mental health survey being conducted in California, this article examines associations between high school students' mental wellness, including covitality (as measured with the Social Emotional Health Survey--Secondary), and school safety perceptions and experiences. Student self-reports reveal a strong positive…

What do K-12 schools need to do to prepare their students for adult success? This was the question that originally catalyzed the standards-and-accountability movement some 30 years ago, though it seems somehow to have gotten lost. Today the question merits revisiting, because addressing it makes a strong case for taking an integrated approach to…

While this article is not about women's colleges or exclusively women presidents, the author notes, it is women's colleges that have experienced the greatest challenges, due primarily to financial constraints and competition. As operational costs escalated and choices for students increased, many small struggling colleges with little or no…

This article presents an interview with Wendy Rogers, a design principal at the architectural firm LPA in Irvine, California, as well as a LEED AP (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Accredited Professional). Throughout her 24-year career she has advocated for sustainable design in schools. Rogers works closely with the US Green…

Several of the campus heritage plans funded by the Getty Foundation served as laboratories for applying the relatively new field of cultural landscape preservation to campus planning. With a strong landscape component, the heritage plans of The University of Kansas, Cranbrook Academy, the University of California, Berkeley, and elsewhere remind…

Sebastian Thrun gave up tenure at Stanford University after 160,000 students signed up for his free online version of the course "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence." The experience completely changed his perspective on education, he said, so he ditched teaching at Stanford and launched the private Web site Udacity, which offers…

A growing body of literature on community gardening, watershed restoration, and similar "civic ecology" practices suggests avenues for integrating social and ecological outcomes in urban natural resources management. In this paper, we argue that an environmental education programme in which learning is situated in civic ecology practices…

This interview took place in several meetings over a period of two weeks in late spring, 2008. Carl Ehmann had spent the past five months working with multiple California community college districts to resolve numerous, and multilevel, shortages in senior leadership positions. Robert A. Frost and Ehmann had come into contact through Frost's…

To explore current and future implications of the economic downturn, "EDUCAUSE Review" assembled a panel of senior IT leaders: (1) Bruce Maas, CIO, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; (2) Fredrick Miller, CIO, Furman University; (3) Pattie Orr, Vice President for IT and Dean of University Libraries, Baylor University; (4) Julie Ouska, CIO…

In the very near future, Latino students will become the majority in California's public schools and because of their great numbers and presence, the pattern of lackluster academic achievement must be a major concern of teachers, school leaders, and policy makers. Despite having made great strides in narrowing the gap that separated them from…

Over the past decade, the Gurian Institute has trained more than forty thousand teachers in more than two thousand schools and districts, both coed and single-sex. The institute's trainers have worked with public and private schools, Montessori schools, and a variety of charter and independent schools in fifteen countries; it has therefore been…

The tension at the heart of pension politics is the incentive to satisfy today's claimants in the here-and-now at the expense of long-term concerns. Rules and auditing standards are intended to tame this kind of short-sighted behavior in the private sector. In the public sector, the primary safeguard is the hope that public officials will not be…

The author writes that for too many low-income students the open door to American higher education has become a revolving door. In examining what can be done, he recognizes the centrality of the classroom to student success.

Teachers must deal with lights that turn off on their own, toilet paper rationing and hot water shortages in the bathrooms, and not enough books for their classes. In this article, the author argues that asking teachers to work in these conditions while holding them accountable for dramatic improvements in student performance threatens to drive…

The purpose of this ethnographic study is to examine how a commitment to socially just pedagogies influences the core practices and policies of a school. This article presents a comprehensive description and analysis of two public middle schools committed to teaching for social justice: Urban Promise Academy and San Francisco Community School.…