The articles of this special issue commemorate 25 years of the Chapter 1 compensatory education program. With the enactment of Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 the Federal government became widely and directly involved in precollegiate education. By 1991, under the Hawkins Stafford Act of 1988, the initiative, renamed…

This issue, the third in a series on the demographic forces shaping public education in the United States, examines the effect of the influx of Hispanic American and Indian immigrants. The first section, "Una Dia Nuevo for Schools," discusses how schools must adjust as Hispanic immigrants fan out to areas beyond those where they have…

This second in a four-part series on why academic achievement gaps exist notes that standard explanations for why minority students trail behind non-Hispanic whites are not good enough, suggesting that no single explanation for the gap exists, but instead a multitude of factors are influential. Poverty, though not the single most important cause,…