The "David" is Fern Creek Elementary, a small urban school in Orlando, Florida, that serves an overwhelmingly disadvantaged student population. The "Goliaths" are the mountains of problems that many inner-city students face--poverty, homelessness, mobility, instability, limited parent involvement, and violent neighborhood…

The Talent Development program at Johns Hopkins, City Year, and Communities in Schools have created a new middle school and high school model that reduces dropout risk. Diplomas Now integrates strategies that are designed to raise student achievement, promotion, and graduation rates in the nation's most challenged high-poverty secondary schools. A…

Systemic (top-down) educational reforms will remain limited unless they improve every teacher's methods and materials. Comprehensive or whole-school reform "scales up" effective schools until many more schools meet state and national standards. The federally funded Comprehensive School Reform Demonstration program provides a supportive…

Describes the approach used by one school district for increasing parent involvement in the schools and improving community understanding and support of school personnel and programs. (JG)

The Results-Based Education Model is an outcomes-based program that unifies instruction, learning, and assessment while building in the greatest possible margin of student success. Delivery is via thematic, integrated, performance-based instructional units. This article explains how R-BEM transformed an impoverished school district in South Bronx,…