Involvement by the adult community in schools and students' lives is an effective way to increase student attendance, boost morale, and improve students' perceptions about their school experience. This study examined a two-year comprehensive community intervention initiative within a high-risk junior high school, measuring its impact on student…

Summarizes findings of diverse multi-year studies conducted by the Systemic and Policy Research team of the Center for Research on the Education of Students Placed At Risk. Results of 16 projects and more than 300 case studies suggest that efforts to implement diverse reforms are more likely to succeed when educators at different levels share…

School counselors working with Ebonics-speaking youth must assume the role of consultants to, and collaborators with, teachers and students toward increasing and improving students' use of Standard English without depreciating their culturally-based dialect and improving the teacher/student relationship in the language-learning process.…

Describes Teaching Love and Compassion (TLC), a program designed to teach patience, respect, and cooperation to middle school students as they learn to care for and train dogs. TLC graduates can continue in a Peer Leadership program to train other dogs or teach elementary school students about animal care. (SLD)

Studied collaborative reasoning in 86 seventh-grade minority students in an urban low-income school. Students who collaborated had higher percentages of fully correct explanations on the posttest than those who worked alone. Collaborative experiences were beneficial for reasoning about unfamiliar, moderately difficult, nonverbal problems. (SLD)

School staff can use information on risk factors to identify student needs and assess the ability of the school to address these needs. It is also important to identify protective factors that promote successful development or buffer risk factors that might otherwise compromise development. Three key factors that have been identified as fostering…

The Ohio Department of Public Schools launched its Ohio Urban Schools Initiative as a commitment to systemic long-term change in the state's 24 urban districts. This report contains a framework that represents the initial phase of the Urban Schools Initiative, which developed into a collaborative effort among the school systems, state and local…

The Community Liaison to Urban Education (CLUE) program operates from the Appalachia Educational Laboratory to research, develop, and implement a collaborative parent-community-school (PCS) education model designed to initiate and sustain the involvement of nonadvantaged parents, community leaders, and community organizations in the education of…

The Faculty Alliance for Education in Newark (New Jersey) is a network of faculty from local universities, a community college, and two high schools, all in the city of Newark, dedicated to improving the opportunities for at-risk youth to achieve a college education and an improved quality of life. It is an initiative of the Newark Educational…

This volume illuminates the most pressing challenges faced by urban schools, teachers, teacher candidates, and teacher training programs and offers a range of insights and possibilities for urban teacher education and teaching. Covering issues spanning the broadly theoretical to the urgently practical, it goes beyond the traditional discourses in…

This paper presents a comparison of performance auditing and evaluation. It is the product of a collaboration between the senior evaluator from the Office of Research and Evaluation in the Austin Independent School District (Texas) and the senior auditor of Austin's City Auditor's Office. These officials were required to work together when the…

This is a summary of work done as part of a multiyear series of professional development engagements between staff in an urban school district and staff of the Urban Education Project at Research for Better Schools. The content section of this report describes the Urban Learner Framework (ULF), a model of the urban learner synthesized from…

To examine new approaches to drug law enforcement, this report presents a number of police programs that emphasize prevention of drug use or disruption of drug transactions. The report is based on extensive interviews with police chiefs and officers, criminologists, criminal justice management consultants, U.S. Department of Justice personnel, and…

School reform leaders in Chicago (Illinois), Denver (Colorado), New York (New York), Seattle (Washington), Philadelphia (Pennsylvania), and Los Angeles (California) created the Cross City Campaign to work for the improvement of urban education so that all students are prepared for postsecondary education, work, and citizenship. This paper, from…

The Community for Learning program (CFL), also known as the Learning City Program, a school-based intervention program, is described. A major premise of this program is that the national standards of educational outcomes can and must be upheld for all students, including those at risk. At the core of the program's design is over 20 years of…