Early childhood has long been known to be a formative time in a child's development-- a time when the brain produces more than 1 million neural connections every second during the first few years of a child's life. However, there are factors at the individual and community levels that impact the development process. In communities across America,…

It is sometimes thought that the innovations needed to make urban schools effective may be somewhat easier to bring about, on the average, in a parochial school than a public school, because it is hypothesized that schools which are not part of a large public school bureaucracy are relatively more free to innovate. If this is true, it is…