Early in 2004 the New England Board of Higher Education bestowed its annual award for excellence on Changing Lives Through Literature. A 1991 experiment that has spread by word of mouth through a dozen courts in Massachusetts, Changing Lives puts the classroom study of literature at the core of an alternative-sentencing program for criminal…

Britain's three-year literacy effort has brought together the federal government, a national broadcasting network, and the voluntary sector in a program that pioneered new methods of teaching basic literacy. Volunteer tutors are used in an educational television venture sponsored by the BBC and the newly-created Adult Literacy Resource Agency.…