Strong Families Strong Schools Builing Community Partnerships For Learning September 1994

This handbook is a resource for parents, community members, teachers, and administrators who want to make a difference in their urban schools. Breault and Allen provide a way for stakeholders to see the roles they can play in building civic capacity for change in urban schools and communities. It also offers critical background information to help stakeholders recognize the complexity and necessity of their efforts. The authors organized this book around the need for beginning, continuing, and enacting conversations to emphasize the need for stakeholders to build relationships with one another in order to advocate for and act on behalf of urban students and communities. While this book eschews prescriptive and simplistic solutions, it does offer ways in which stakeholders create and support an infrastructure for change in their schools and communities. For example, this book helps stakeholders navigate the bureaucracy of urban school districts, build collegial communities of inquiry within schools, develop systematic ways of gathering important data schools and communities, organize the energy and efforts of those who want to get involved, seek out, and utilize various resources, and then use the infrastructure of knowledgeable and collegial stakeholders to bring about change. The authors realize how daunting these challenges may seem for stakeholders who want to make a difference in their schools and communities. In response, they offer images of positive changes including schools, parent associations, and networking strategies used in urban communities today as glimpses of what is possible through hard work, collaboration, and an imaginative spirit.

Here are the eight skills this book will help you master: 1. Identify your thoughts and feelings: how to tap into your feelings, especially the negative ones 2. Evaluate your negative feelings, negative thoughts, and options: how to decide when to take action 3. Communicate better: how to be a more effective listener and speaker 4. Empathize with others to understand their behavior: how to appreciate a situation from someone else's point of view 5. Do problem-solving: how to define the problem, generate alternatives, and evaluate the outcomes 6. Practice assertion: how to get others to do what you want 7. Practice acceptance: how to back off without feeling like a failure 8. Emphasize the positive: how to build better relationships using a proven ratio of positive to negative interactions Lifeskills shows how building better relationships is an essential part of preserving health--and offers eight clear steps anyone can use to make that happen.

This document, one of four volumes comprising the 1995 Goals Report, is the fifth in a series of annual reports. This core report for 1995 focuses on approximately two dozen indicators that show the progress made by the United States toward the National Education Goals. National performance has improved in five areas, gotten worse in seven, and, in eight areas, no significant changes in national performance have occurred. Progress has occurred in the areas of student readiness and mathematics achievement; participation in Advanced Placement examinations such as English, mathematics, science, and history; and early prenatal care. However, there has been some decline in the area of providing safe environments conducive to learning. The report focuses on the essential role that families play in helping to achieve the National Education Goals and suggests ways in which schools can involve them in partnerships. State and national progress on the core indicators is presented in detail. Twenty-five figures and eight tables as well as the 1995 National Education Goals Report Questionnaire are included. Appendices contain technical notes and a list of the National Education Goals panel staff. (LMI)

Fifth in a series of annual reports to measure progress toward the Nat. Educ. Goals through the year 2000. Consists of 4 documents: the Core Report (CR), the Nat. and State Data Vols. (NSDV), and the exec. summ. The CR focuses on two dozen core indicators to convey to parents, educators, and policymakers how far we are from achievement of the Goals and what we must do in order to reach them. The NSDV includes comprehensive sets of measures to describe progress at the nat. level and the progress that states have made against their own baselines.