Superficially, the Brooklyn Generation School, in the Flatbush area, looks a lot like the other six small public high schools that share space in this tall building, the former South Shore High School. What's noticeably different about it, though, is the strength of the relationships among staff members. Teachers can be seen running across the…

Across New Orleans' still-emerging patchwork of regular public schools and charter schools, the emotional, social, and academic damage that the August 2005 hurricane inflicted on the city's children plays out daily, in disruptions to instruction, in schoolyard fights, and in classrooms half-empty because of chronic absenteeism. Over a three-month…

This article deals with school districts' K-8 configurations. Cincinnati, Cleveland, Milwaukee, New York, and Philadelphia are among the districts making the change, driven by a small body of research and a rising pile of anecdotes suggesting that K-8 configurations help academic performance, decrease discipline problems, enhance parent…

In this article, the author discusses a school improvement model, First Things First, developed by James P. Connell, a former tenured professor of psychology at the University of Rochester in New York. The model has three pillars for the high school level: (1) small, themed learning communities that each keep a group of students together…