Substance use among youth remains a major public health and safety concern. One fundamental way to address youth substance use prevention is to keep young people on a positive trajectory by engaging them in positive activities from early years of their childhood. In this article, the author offers a best practice analysis of systematic review…

This paper summarizes the results of a study of the local consequences of implementing statewide minimum competency tests. For American education to be the best in the world, the use of statewide and nationwide standardized testing as a primary policy tool for stimulating reform must be discontinued. Second, school district responses to such…

This paper presents a set of general observations about state-sponsored school improvement initiatives with data from several sources. One major source is the Research for Better Schools, Inc., Philadelphia (Pennsylvania), implementation study, "Facing the Challenge: Selected Programs and Practices of the Urban Initiative's Operation School…