An urban university music education department and an outreach organization partnered to provide after-school music classes for at-risk children. Fourteen music education majors were recruited to teach 125 first through fifth graders (6-12 years of age), whose ethnicity was 55 percent Hispanic and 45 percent African-American. Classes included…

Rather than viewing youth as an isolated and alienated subculture, it is more useful to view the needs of youth as largely determined by where and how they live, and to recognize that they differ from one another just as adults do. Professionals and volunteers in community youth programs need to understand how the youth they work with experience…

An ethnographic study examined the attitudes of Chinese American families toward success in school and learning. The first cohort of 5 families stayed in the study for 3 years, while the second cohort of 5 families stayed for 2 years. All the first cohort children and two from the second cohort were from the same Boston (Massachusetts) school. The…

A pilot survey was conducted to explore why some young African American men living in cities stay in high school and why others drop out. Between October 1993 and March 1994, face-to-face interviews were conducted with 360 young black men aged 17 to 22, randomly drawn from census tracts in New York (New York), Chicago (Illinois), Los Angeles…

The Reading Recovery (RR) program of the San Diego City Schools (California) has expanded over the last 5 years and now includes 38 schools. This report documents the program's short-term and sustained efforts to increase reading achievement and its central office costs. RR is a Title I-funded early intervention program that uses one-on-one…

Charter schools are created and managed by an entity composed of parents and/ or teachers, community and/or business leaders, nonprofit organizations, and for-profit businesses. Many people believe that charter schools can provide a high quality education without the regulatory constraints of the conventional public schools. This digest reviews…

Social Skills Training (SST) has become a popular and effective means of prevention and intervention with adolescent populations exhibiting behavioral difficulties. Early in their development many African-American youth are exposed to homicide, crime, and interpersonal violence. The acquisition of social skills is critical to the development of…

Caminos Bilingues al Exito (Bilingual Pathways to Success), a comprehensive Title VII Bilingual Education program was established in 1995 to serve the 17 schools of the North Area Management District of the Houston Independent School District (Texas). Through teacher training, staff development, parental involvement, and instructional program…

The Safe and Drug-Free Schools and Communities (SDFSC) Act of 1986 provides funding to school districts to supplement local efforts to eliminate drug and alcohol use by their students. In 1995-96, its ninth year of funding, the Austin Independent School District (AISD) (Texas) received $363,720 from the SDFSC grant plus a sum carried over from…

Drawing on J. Epstein's theory of overlapping spheres of influence (1991, 1995), this study explores the effects of teacher, family, and church support on the school-related attitudes, behaviors, and academic achievement of African American, urban adolescents. To achieve this objective, 826 students in an urban school district in the southeastern…

The seven short stories in this collection portray the lives of Puerto Rican children and adolescents in the South Bronx (New York City). The hopelessness of many Puerto Rican and Black youth is vividly depicted in stories dealing with drug use, discrimination, unwanted and early pregnancy, and a host of other urban social ills. Titles of the…

The school readiness goal of the America 2000 educational reform program admits that not all children start school ready to learn, but implies that with proper and adequate interventions, all children can start with the requisite cognitive and social adaptive skills that will enable them to learn. This paper discusses and analyzes critical skills…

This final report attempts to capture the work and atmosphere of the recent symposium convened by Motivational Educational Entertainment, Inc. (MEE), a black-owned communications research, consulting, and video production company. In its commitment to helping urban youth, MEE conducted a study of the "hip-hop" generation and its…

This publication, the third in a series of annual updates concerning young children and their families living in poverty in the United States, incorporates new statistical information from the 1992 March Supplement to the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey. The data provide an estimate of family poverty status for 1991 as measured by the…

This paper considers whether ethnicity is a social construction that is constantly being recreated in a nexus of shifting social relations rather than a set of perceptions and behaviors that remain constant and stem from a youth's membership in an ethnic group. Student responses about ethnicity from a larger study of student role and engagement in…