Making Schools Work For Underachieving Minority Students

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.

"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."--BOOK JACKET.

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.

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.

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."