For decades, for-profit educational provision has been merely tolerated, often grudgingly. In the world of charter schooling, for-profit providers are lambasted and sometimes prohibited. In higher education, for-profit institutions have grown rapidly, enrolling millions of nontraditional students and earning enmity, suspicion, and now…

"Straight A's: Public Education Policy and Progress" is a biweekly newsletter that focuses on education news and events both in Washington, DC and around the country. The following articles are included in this issue: (1) U.S. Senators Harkin and Enzi Release Draft Language to Revise NCLB: Senate Committee to Consider Draft Containing…

Tips for enhancing parent-teacher communications include volunteer, get to know the teacher, make an appointment before seeing the teacher, provide positive feedback, contact the teacher early with problems, suggest PTA-sponsored communications workshops, respect teachers' perspectives, express anger elsewhere, accept positive and negative…

Communication between parents and teachers is complicated, with attitudes often becoming barriers to effective communication. Factors that affect parent-teacher relationships include childhood memories, professionalization, and bureaucratization. Suggestions for parents to improve communications with teachers include examining their own feelings…

This book represents the most thorough exposition on the present understanding of the impetuses, debates, legalities, and effectiveness of school uniform policies that have rapidly entered the discourse of school reform in the United States. In it, David Brunsma provides an antidote to the ungrounded, anecdotal components that define the…

Noting that children bear a natural curiosity and urge to learn about the world around them, and that the nature of compulsory schooling is at odds with this inclination, this book explores why parents remove their children from schools to teach them at home and provides step-by-step guidance for parents who want to home school their children.…

This book explores what makes a school excellent. Schools are considered excellent, "good enough," or bad, depending upon multiple factors; "good enough" implies that a school could be doing better. The use and misuse of testing and educational assessment are discussed. Academic assessment based on multiple measures is recommended over high-stakes…

This report presents the results of 18 months of work of the Maryland State Task Force on Reading, which investigated cutting edge research, best practices, and assessment data in order to formulate recommendations to guide programs in reading across the state. The report's center piece is a set of Design Principles for Improving Reading in…

Considers the relationship between parents and the public schools and objectively enumerates parents' legal and social rights and responsibilities, concluding that parents have the opportunity to be significant change agents in the lives of children and schools. (NKA)

Maintaining that urban teaching and learning is characterized by many contradictions, this book proposes that there is a wide range of social, cultural, psychological, and pedagogical knowledge urban educators must possess in order to engage in effective and transformative practice. It is necessary for those teaching in urban schools to be…

Multicultural education has at least two faces--an academic one and an ideological one. Encouraging the balkanization of U.S. culture threatens to undermine the academic integrity of the social studies curriculum. Offers suggestions to make sure that schools are offering an academically rigorous multicultural curriculum, not political…

To ensure quality programs in gifted education, parents, teachers, and concerned citizens should become involved in development of education policies. Influencing public policy involves determining which government structure has jurisdiction over the policy and lobbying for legislative action by attending public hearings, writing letters, working…

Annotations of 82 articles and 32 reports, books, and studies related to public school choice are grouped under: (1) sources from a national perspective; (2) sources from a state perspective; (3) local choice plans; and (4) material useful to parents. Several annotations include information on ordering documents, and six contacts for further…

This document presents a step-by-step strategy, in a question-and-answer format, for mounting a successful political campaign for school board. Part one, the introduction, provides advice on how to acquire the necessary background knowledge of a school district and suggests possible campaign themes such as "parents' rights" or "back to basics."…

Step-by-step advice for Spanish-speaking parents on how to choose among available schools for their children is offered in this guidebook. Factors to consider in making the choice are discussed, as well as information on alternatives to the available choices, which include home schooling and working to create new options. After an introductory…