In this essay, the author reviews "Education Reform in New York City: Ambitious Change in the Nation's Most Complex School System," by Jennifer A. O'Day, Catherine S. Bitter, and Louis Gomez. The book under review explores a larger set of issues, and some time has passed. But many of the issues studied remain relevant and the consistent…

Findings by C. Ripple and colleagues justify a continued role for the federal Head Start program, but only if Head Start invests seriously and consistently in high-quality programs and ends the present fragmentation of services. Calls for effective technical assistance to programs and active collaboration with other agencies. (SLD)

Reviews "History and Educational Policy Making," which includes several essays written over time by one author. The general theme is history informing policy decisions. The essays provide capsule histories of particular federal programs, demonstrating how politics have intervened to dictate policies inconsistent with history or research results.…

Written by leading special education researchers with the National Research Center on Learning Disabilities and the University of Kansas, this comprehensive yet accessible reference provides administrators with practical guidelines for launching RTI in their schools. Highlighting the powerful role that RTI can play in prevention, early…

Draws attention to some of the unexamined assumptions on which W. Bowen and D. Bok base their analysis and considers some of the unintended, and often undesired, consequences of racial preferences in college admissions. (SLD)

The one-page abstract summarizes "Research on the Effectiveness of Early Childhood Education," an ERIC Computer Search Reprint containing bibliographic information and abstracts of 64 studies of early intervention. The citations are discussed in five categories: research overviews, methodological studies, policies and large-scale…

Reviews "War against the School's Academic Child Abuse," by Siegfried Engelmann, which criticizes the government, textbook publishers, colleges of education, professional organizations, and businesses for playing politics and not acknowledging what schools need to change to benefit students. Relates Engelmann's experience in promoting…

Reviews a 1994 U.S. General Accounting Office study entitled "Limited-English Proficiency: A Growing and Costly Educational Challenge Facing Many School Districts." The article argues that the report is biased in favor of full bilingual instruction over other methods of teaching English to limited English proficient students. (Contains…

"Contested Ground: Performance Accountability in Adult Basic Education" (ABE) is one of the most important books on adult literacy policy at the turn of the century. In it, Juliet Merrifield examines the critical issues of policy, practice, and theory with which the field is currently consumed. She and her colleagues maintain that the concept of…