Strong school and family ties have long shown success in influencing positive child development and lasting academic success. While a multitude of programs exist to help facilitate the school-family connection, one program in particular, Families and Schools Together, or FAST, stands out as an effective prevention program that is suitable for a…

Most K-12 evaluations are designed to make inferences about how a program implemented at the classroom or school level affects student learning outcomes and such inferences inherently involve hierarchical data structure. One methodological challenge for evaluators is linking program implementation factors typically measured at the classroom or…

This article outlines the main features of the present pension insurance scheme in the Federal Republic of Germany, the proposals of the Commission of Experts to Study the Social Security Status of Women and Survivors, the prospects for their implementation, and the essential aspects of the reform. (CT)

Discusses the usefulness and importance of international labor standards for workers; workers' participation in the International Labour Organisation's (ILO) standard-setting activities and in the implementation of international labor standards; and the ILO's procedures of supervision. (CT)

Program-theory approaches to evaluation have gained acceptability over the past 25 years as a means for examining conditions for implementation that are associated with better outcomes and developing detailed program theory. They have also gained confusion, as witnessed in the review of recent studies in this article. (Author/SLD)

Reducing violence in schools is a major concern of educators, parents, and legislators. Violence manifests itself in numerous ways, and there is growing evidence that low-level or underlying forms of violence have a profound effect on the learning environment of the school. Bullying is the most prevalent form of low-level violence in schools today…

Background/Context: The Research Training Grant (RTG) program at the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education aimed to create strong research training experiences for predissertation fellows through generous financial aid, mentored research apprenticeships, and cocurricular experiences. Collectively these offerings sought to…

The preceptor program at the University of Hartford was designed to increase engagement among first-year students and to provide role-modeling opportunities for upper-class students. Data from the first two years of the program were examined. In the first year, 611 undergraduate students in 40 introductory-level courses (26 with preceptors, 14…

Purpose: This paper aims to trace the evolution of two initiatives--the direct subsidy scheme and independent schools initiative--their genesis, rationale, current form and take-up rate. It also analyses them as education reforms in terms of policymaking dynamics. The very notion of the term "privatization" will be examined.…

This article draws on Bourdieu's field theory and related concepts of habitus and capitals, to explore policy implementation in relation to a particular case of teacher professional development in Queensland, Australia. This implementation process is described as an effect of the interplay between what is called the policy field and the field of…

This paper describes three multigrade school reforms in Latin America: (1) Colombia's "Escuela Nueva", (2) Guatemala's "Nueva Escuela Unitaria", and (3) Chile's MECE-Rural. Each reform endowed primary teachers and students with special training and instructional materials, and encouraged new kinds of instruction in rural…

This paper presents the root causes of the resistance of mainstream European educational institutions to implementation of minority language programmes (bilingual programmes with both an official/dominant language and an immigrant minority language as media of instruction). Differential treatment of different minority languages in the mainstream…

Learning Study provides a distinctive model for collaborative practice in teacher development. It combines the intensive "plan-teach-review" model developed by the Japanese "Lesson Study" model with a focus on the outcomes of learning using variation theory. We present an argument for expecting this approach to help trainees in initial teacher…

This paper reports the results of a ten-year effort to establish ethics as a learning objective for all business students, to assess the effectiveness in achieving that learning objective and to incorporate ethical conduct as a part of the school's organizational culture. First, it addresses the importance of ethics instruction for all business…

This policy analysis was produced for the Wyoming Department of Administration and Information by MPR Associates, Inc. Its purpose was to examine federal and state policy related to career and technical education (CTE) to determine whether existing policy (in the form of statutes, rules, regulations, and guidance) could either promote or impede…