This dissertation, which won the Dissertation of the Year Award, examines how stakeholders in an Appalachian Kentucky high school addressed educational problems that they had targeted for reform. Set against the backdrop of the Kentucky Education Reform Act (KERA), this ethnographic study describes the challenges of effectively coupling top-down…

This digest reviews findings about the nature of rural child care and suggests implications for practitioners and policymakers. Rural families experience child care differently from urban ones on a number of counts. Center-based care is less available to rural children, and rural day care centers tend to be of lower quality in terms of teacher…

This document reports on a project to conduct four to six in-service workshops for adult basic education (ABE) educators to develop their public speaking skills and create a speakers' bureau of ABE alumni. The goal of the speakers' bureau was to increase recruitment and retention of ABE students and improve public awareness of ABE. The packet of…

No institution is better positioned to address the problems facing today's communities than the community college. The colleges are community-based and, through community-based programming (CBP), can place themselves at the center of the organizations and institutions, and collaborate with formal or informal leaders devoted to resolving community…

Gathered from practitioners in Washington state, this resource book contains composite lists of volunteer tutor management ideas and practices for teachers of literacy and English as a second language. The guide brings together into one reference work the ideas and resources gathered from 28 programs. The guide is organized around the three major…

The paper examines six issues affecting the development of vocational education programs for handicapped students in rural areas. Problems facing special education in rural areas include financial difficulties and inadequate services. The following six issues are addressed (sample recommended strategies for change in parentheses): broadening the…

Economic status determined the effects of declining public revenues and a tighter economy on residents of Farmville, Virginia, a small, conservative, rural, Southern community with underdeveloped social services, whose class relations still reflect racial segregation, whose concern for local autonomy is so great that external funding sources are…

This guide describes programs created by the Ysleta, Texas, Independent School District to promote sex equity in its high school programs. The programs described have been successful in leading both boys and girls to choose vocational education programs for jobs nontraditional for their sex. The guide describes the following five types of…

Produced for pastors, parents, and church members who consider service to families with young children a vital part of ministry, this manual presents information to stimulate enthusiasm about child day care as an important part of church mission. Its goal is to describe the church's unique opportunity to care for children and to offer guidance to…

"The State of the Art" is a bibliographical essay current to 1975 consisting of 300 items relating to home-school-community relations. This literature was examined in order to (1) provide a conceptual framework for home-school-community relations, (2) develop a classification scheme for existing theory and practice, and (3) suggest further…

Proceedings are reported of a seminar held to aid teachers, administrators, and educational leaders in understanding and working with Indian children. Difficulties encountered by Indian pupils in social-academic adjustment are presented in addition to an historical background of the Indian community. The need for better community and parent-school…

This paper deals with the integrative function of sign language in the British deaf community. Sign language communities exhibit a special case of diglossia in that they exist within a larger, hearing community not necessarily characterized by diglossia itself. British Sign Language includes at least two diglossic varieties, with different…

Black newspapers should not go unnoticed by school administrators, as they too often are. Black people have a long and proud history of intraracial communication. More than 200 "black" periodicals work hard at forming, leading, and interpreting for black communities. No black community is totally dependent upon the standard white-owned and…

The Philadelphia Commission on Decentralization and Community Participation offers plans for reforms on the school and district level. On the school level, three options are suggested: (1) informal community participation in decision-making; (2) advisory participation in the form of an elected or appointed committee from the community; or, (3)…

A study of the museum as an organizational context for the fine arts was undertaken (1) to understand how such an organization defines its role, maintains its standards, and copes with its social environment, and (2) to evaluate the statement by critics of contemporary culture that the fine arts and organizations supporting them are declining.…