Incarcerated youth should be afforded the opportunity to develop the advanced academic and vocational skills needed to be competitive in today's labor market. Correctional facility administrators regard education as the most important component of the rehabilitation process. Correctional facilities must therefore make education and training high…

A look at various methods of evaluating vocational education and training in Europe shows traditional practices (correlated with results and objectives) using new interactive approaches. Because of the great variety of situations, levels of awareness, diversity of tools, and multiplicity of participants, the improvement of evaluation practices…

The individual responsible for spearheading reform for the education of limited-English-proficient (LEP) students in Linda Vista Elementary School (San Diego, California) describes the process, issues, and outcomes of the initiative in this theme issue. Linda Vista Elementary School has a student population that is 77 percent LEP. The personalized…

Projects supported by the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) have a very high survival ratio after the grant has ended. The reason for this success seems to lie in the structure and principles of FIPSE. These principles (which can be adopted as guidelines in the creation of other innovation funds) include allowing maximum…

The Flint (Michigan) Community Schools developed a four-phase School Improvement process model. In Phase 1 (Commitment), school district and administrative support were obtained and pilot schools were selected (one elementary and one middle school). The principals of these schools and one teacher representative from each received training in…

Work-Based Learning (WBL) has been at the heart of school-to-work initiatives in the 1990s. Local partnerships funded by the 1994 School-to-Work Opportunities Act are placing high priority on developing WBL opportunities for students. However, there is still controversy about whether work really contributes to students' education, and results of…

Work undertaken to improve the effectiveness of the United Kingdom's schools and further education (FE) sectors was identified and assessed in a study entailing four data collection methods: literature review; questionnaire administered to all FE college principals in England and Wales; expert seminar and face-to-face interviews with high-level…

The objectives of this seminar were to identify problems in evaluating literacy programs and to design a working strategy to confront them. Four presentations included national case studies from Brazil, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Central questions asked concerned who and what were evaluated and how were the results to be used. In Brazil,…

This pamphlet examines the Writing-to-Learn project of the University of Tennessee (Knoxville), a writing-across-the-curriculum (WAC) program. The WAC theory is first discussed in terms of three primary approaches to linguistic behavior as reflected in three predominant attitudes toward composition theory in use today: the traditional, the…

The seven chapters of this theme issue explore current developments in research into educational accountability. State educational performance reporting policies, resource allocation for accountability, and educational reforms in Canada, Hong Kong, and Malaysia are discussed. The final chapters consider accountability policy research. (SLD)

This bulletin summarizes research on the benefits of inclusive education programs; provides data on the current status of special education; and considers studies of individual inclusion programs, state and district studies, and the effects of inclusion on students without disabilities. The research and evaluation data on inclusion indicate a…

Hospitals--the most costly segment of the health care system--are beginning to use benchmarking to discover how other hospitals and businesses have developed cost-cutting and time-saving ways of doing things. Benchmarking is a sophisticated, multifaceted procedure, usually conducted by teams, for identifying and adapting best-in-class practices.…

This document contains seven issues of an information letter from the International Project on Technical and Vocational Education (UNEVOC). Issue 1 includes an overview of the initial phase of the UNEVOC Project, together with a description of its background, structure and mechanism, and program areas. Issue 2 reports UNEVOC activities carried out…

This research bulletin presents six selected papers from the annual conference of the Florida Educational Research Council. The papers are intended to help educators improve the quality of education in their communities. The papers are: (1) "Minority Education Intervention: The Experience of Two Programs with Middle and High School Students…

Developed by Japanese corporations to improve productivity and product quality, quality circles (QC's) are small, voluntary groups of workers who share common job responsibilities and who meet regularly to generate solutions to problems. Features of QC's that are applicable to schools are examined in the nine articles summarized in this annotated…