Labeled A Nation at Risk, Americans are urgently seeking reform in their public school systems. While many promising programs are being developed, they have not yet been validated. The national conference Making Schools Work for Underachieving Minority Students shared the best of what is presently known and deliberated on the implications for research, policy, and practice. Sponsored by CRESST (Center for Research on Evaluation Standards and Student Testing), The National Urban League, and the National Council of LaRaza, the conference was financed by the U.S. Department of Education. Closely following the structure of the conference, this volume's contributors examine education's current status. They then investigate potentially promising approaches to specific problem areas. Contributors treat issues of evaluation and testing, and conclude by addressing the potential of collaborative efforts. Responding to a major challenge, community groups and organizations throughout the country are seeking answers to the problem of underachieving minority students. This volume builds on these shared interests and is a first step toward an intervention process. Topics covered include: creating effective instructional programs; reducing the dropout rate; preparing students for secondary and postsecondary success; helping limited English proficient students; and improving teacher quality. The volume's contributors hope to promote dialogue on promising practices, foster collaboration, identify critical R & D needs and collaborative arrangements, and identify testing and evaluation issues for subsequent inquiry.

Introducing a bold, persuasive new argument into the national debate over education, Dr. William Ouchi describes a revolutionary approach to creating successful public schools. This program has produced significant, lasting improvements in the school districts where it has already been implemented. Drawing on the results of a landmark study of 223 schools in six cities, a project that Ouchi supervised and that was funded in part by the National Science Foundation, Making Schools Work shows that a school's educational performance may be most directly affected by how the school is managed. Ouchi's 2001-2002 study examined innovative school systems in Edmonton (Canada), Seattle, and Houston, and compared them with the three largest traditional school systems: New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Researchers discovered that the schools that consistently performed best also had the most decentralized management systems, in which autonomous principals -- not administrators in a central office -- controlled school budgets and personnel hiring policies. They were fully responsible and fully accountable for the performance of their schools. With greater freedom and flexibility to shape their educational programs, hire specialists as needed, and generally determine the direction of their school, the best principals will act as entrepreneurs, says Ouchi. Those who do poorly are placed under the supervision of successful principals, who assume responsibility for the failing schools. An essential component of this management approach is the Weighted Student Formula, a budgetary tool whereby every student is evaluated and assessed a certain dollar value in educational services (a non-English-speaking or autistic student, or one from a low-income family, for example, would receive a higher dollar value than a middle-class student with no special needs). Families have the freedom to choose among public schools, and when schools must compete for students, good schools flourish while those that do poorly literally go out of business. Such accountability has long worked for religious and independent schools, where parents pay a premium for educational performance. Making Schools Work shows how the same approach can be adapted to public schools. The book also provides guidelines for parents on how to evaluate a school and make sure their child is getting the best education possible. Revolutionary yet practical, Making Schools Work shows that positive educational reform is within reach and, indeed, already happening in schools across the country.

In her new book, prominent professional developer Yvette Jackson focuses on students' strengths, rather than their weaknesses, To reinvigorate educators to inspire learning and high intellectual performance. Through the lens of educational psychology and historical reforms, Jackson responds To The faltering motivation and confidence of educators in terms of its effects on closing the achievement gap. The author seeks to "rekindle the belief in the vast capacity of underachieving urban students," and offers strategies to help educators inspire intellectual performance. Jackson proposes that a paradigm shift towards a focus on strengths will reinvigorate educators' passion for teaching and belief in their ability to raise the intellectual achievement of their students. Jackson addresses how educators can systematically support the development of motivation, reflective and cognitive skills, and high performance when standards and assessments are predisposed to non-conceptual methods. Furthermore, she examines challenges and offers strategies for dealing with cultural disconnects, The influence of new technologies, and language preferences of students.

This six-volume set focuses on Latin American, Caribbean, and Asian immigration, which accounts for nearly 80 percent of all new immigration to the United States. The volumes contain the essential scholarship of the last decade and present key contributions reflecting the major theoretical, empirical, and policy debates about the new immigration. The material addresses vital issues of race, gender, and socioeconomic status as they intersect with the contemporary immigration experience. Organized by theme, each volume stands as an independent contribution to immigration studies, with seminal journal articles and book chapters from hard-to-find sources, comprising the most important literature on the subject. The individual volumes include a brief preface presenting the major themes that emerge in the materials, and a bibliography of further recommended readings. In its coverage of the most influential scholarship on the social, economic, educational, and civil rights issues revolving around new immigration, this collection provides an invaluable resource for students and researchers in a wide range of fields, including contemporary American history, public policy, education, sociology, political science, demographics, immigration law, ESL, linguistics, and more.

Collection of essays tracing the historical evolution of African American experiences, from the dawn of Reconstruction onward, through the perspectives of sociology, political science, law, economics, education and psychology. As a whole, the book is a systematic study of the gap between promise and performance of African Americans since 1865. Over the course of thirty-four chapters, contributors present a portrait of the particular hurdles faced by African Americans and the distinctive contributions African Americans have made to the development of U.S. institutions and culture. --From publisher description.

This volume is an extended case study of a hypothetical school district--its residential communities, a middle school and secondary school, its students, teachers, administrators, parents and board members. An integrated series of cases, all dealing with characters and situations within the school district, it offers a realistic picture of what teaching is really about. Case activities increase readers' awareness of the professional aspects of teaching, and provide opportunities for teacher reflection and decision making and for dealing with the consequences of teacher actions. Chapters 2-15 include "Questions for Reflection and Discussion," "Class and Individual Projects," and "Questions Based on Activities." Most chapters conclude with "Additional Teaching and Learning Skills" and "Suggestions For Further Reading."

This book is a call to action to parents, youth workers, policymakers—anyone who works for and worries about the next generation—to recognize and promote the values of caring in public and private life. It is about teenagers—those who no longer need the care given to babies and children but who still need support and guidance. Diana Mendley Rauner offers a rare focus on youth development as a process of experiencing care and learning social responsibility. Much public discussion of youth focuses on individual achievement and a limited set of markers of success, on the one hand, and increasingly punitive responses to failure on the other. Missing from these discussions is an appreciation for the importance of caring and social responsibility both in the environments we create for young people and in our expectations of how they should act and what they should become. "They Still Pick Me Up When I Fall" develops ideals for caring interaction, articulating specific behaviors and habits for practitioners as well as policies and practices that characterize caring organizations and caring societies. Each chapter begins with a profile of a youth-serving organization, drawn from the fields of education, youth work, and counseling. Throughout, an intellectual framework for care is interwoven with the voices and experiences of the youth workers and young people involved in the struggle to create a caring society.