Horizon High School combats student dropout rates in Bakersfield (California) by maintaining a small enrollment, high community involvement, close student-teacher relationships, flexible scheduling, and attention to individual students' educational needs and interests. Student attendance, graduation rates, and standardized test scores are…

Competition, in classrooms as on the athletic fields, could destroy childhood and distort an entire lifetime. In an educational institution there is no need for grading, promotion, ranking, tracking, or labeling. A tremendous burden would be removed if teachers could teach without "evaluation," if people would come to school to learn rather than…

Identifies five factors that appear to have contributed to the survival of several firmly established programs in the alternative school movement. (Author/WD)

Describes the current crisis in public education and proposes a new paradigm of holistic education aimed at increasing students' abilities to direct their own lives and learning. Students would experience directed, assigned, self-directed, and open learning every year, and the twelfth year would be self-designed and managed. (MJL)

Describes an open-format laboratory school housed on the campus of Manakato University in Minnesota that was the antithesis of dominant schooling patterns in 1968. Wilson Campus School practiced early forms of authentic assessment, participative decision making, cooperative learning, nongraded student grouping, multicultural education, and…