Increasingly, state departments of education, school districts, and high schools are recognizing that many students graduate from high school underprepared for college-level coursework in mathematics. Many are referred to remedial education when they arrive at college. To help students become better prepared for college and avoid remedial courses…

An understanding of foresters' perceptions of climate change is important for developing effective educational programs on adaptive forest management. We surveyed 1,398 foresters in the southern United States regarding their perceptions of climate change, observations and concerns about climatic and forest conditions, and knowledge of and interest…

This study characterized perceptions of agricultural leadership programs in colleges of agriculture, food, life, human, or environmental sciences at 1,862 land-grant institutions. Objectives included describing the need for programs, studying evolution within the discipline, discussing faculty recommendations for future development, and examining…

Corn clubs played an important role in improving agriculture at the turn of the 20th century. Corn clubs were local organizations consisting of boys who cultivated corn on one acre of land under the supervision of a local club leader. The purpose of this historical research study was to document the organization, operation, and outcomes of corn…

Magnet schools gained prominence in education in the 1970s as a tool for achieving voluntary desegregation in lieu of forced busing. The theory behind magnet schools as a desegregation tool is simple: Create a school so distinctive and appealing--so magnetic--that it will draw a diverse range of families from throughout the community eager to…

In 1998, the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) began developing what is now the Appalachian Higher Education (AHE) Network. The AHE Network, currently composed of eight centers, has the mission of increasing the college-going rate in Appalachia, the numbers of students who continue their education directly after graduating high school. This…

The State plans for professional staff development and training presented in this publication are those developed over a two-year period by eight Southeastern states participating in a cooperative regional project. The plans are indicative of the progress toward building institutionalized systems for training adult basic education personnel within…

This document reports how the Council of State Policy and Planning Agencies (CSPA) Academy process helped nine states develop workplace literacy initiatives involving their governors' offices, the Job Training Partnership Act system, and the educational system. The states were Florida, Idaho, Massachusetts, Michigan, North Carolina, Tennessee,…

The six sections of this report describe the collection of occupational information on an interstate basis to plan effective education programs for manpower development. Focus is on eight southern states--Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee. Section 1 discusses two views of vocational…

In the 1990s, the nation's educational focus turned to troubled schools in the nation's poorest cities. Under the leadership of Luther Williams, then Assistant Director of the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Urban Systemic Initiative was created to improve the teaching and learning of science and mathematics. Recognizing that high-needs…

The mission of the Appalachian Rural Systemic Initiative (ARSI) was to build a long-term capacity that would improve the educational structures of the rural communities it served. The major strategy ARSI used to create improvement communities across Appalachia was to identify, embrace and educate individual teachers, who became ARSI Teacher…