"Alabama Education News" is published monthly except for June, July, and December by the Alabama Department of Education. This publication, authorized by Section 16-2-4 of the "Code of Alabama", as recompiled in 1975, is a public service of the Alabama Department of Education designed to inform citizens and educators about…

"Cooling out" was identified in 1960 as a specific function of the community college in redirecting students who experienced academic failure. The "soft" cooling out process, which re-directs students into less demanding curricula or out of the college through counseling and advising rather than academic discipline, will increasingly become a…

This paper empirically examines one aspect of Basil Bernstein's sociolinguistic account of educational failure, a code thesis wherein a restricted code is defined as giving access only to "particularistic" meanings and an elaborated code is defined as giving access also to "universalistic" meanings. According to Bernstein,…

In this article, the author observes how a combination of interrelated elements are currently changing the face of the civilizing traditions of the U.S. education and forming a new culture of childhood. These include: (1) the standardization of education; (2) the dissolution of traditional spontaneous play; and (3) the growing specter of poverty…

Undergraduate retention is a major concern for universities and first year failure is a significant contributor to the overall statistics for non-progression. This report describes an interview-based investigation of students' perceptions for the reasons underlying their failure in 1st and 2nd semester modules. The most commonly cited reasons were…

Despite often lofty rhetoric in a large number of national and international initiatives and in speeches of national and international politicians and bureaucrats, and despite a long history of awareness and the increased visibility of the generally abysmal situation of the Roma in Europe, there is still no serious reason to hope that the lives of…

The reason modernity has become a core topic in the field of educational anthropology is because it has caused tremendous changes in education, making the content, the form, and even the concepts and substance of education different from what they were before and creating a historical process that people often describe in terms of…

In the tradition of peer review, the members of a profession form with society an unwritten contract whereby society grants the profession autonomy to govern itself and, in return, the members of the profession agree to meet correlative personal and collegial group duties to society. The members of the profession agree to restrain self-interest to…

School administrators, teachers, parents, and juvenile justice officials have long been concerned about the problem of truancy in schools, especially since truancy has been linked to problem behaviors, including academic failure, school dropout, and delinquency. Thus, the prevention of truancy and programs designed to break the cycle of chronic…

Responsiveness to intervention (RTI) is being proposed as an alternative model for making decisions about the presence or absence of specific learning disability. We argue that many questions about RTI remain unanswered, and that radical changes in the proposed regulations are not warranted at this time. Since many fundamental issues related to…

The research and theoretical rationale for differences between (urban) black and white students, particularly in achievement in language development, are discussed along with implications for the classroom. Theories about language acquisition and capacity that have developed to account for the poor school performance of urban black students…

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE PREVENTION OF FAILURE IN SCHOOL IS THE MAIN THEME OF THIS PAMPHLET. THE DIFFERENT FORCES WHICH INFLUENCE THE SELF-IMAGES OF CHILDREN, THEIR SCHOOL PERFORMANCE, ACCEPTANCE OR REJECTION BY OTHER CHILDREN, AND, MOST IMPORTANT, ACCEPTANCE OR REJECTION BY THE TEACHER HERSELF, ARE DISCUSSED IN A GROUP OF PAPERS UNDER ELEVEN…

Students exhibiting failure syndrome approach assignments with low expectations of success and tend to give up at early signs of difficulty. This Digest delineates the nature of failure syndrome, suggests strategies for coping with failure syndrome students, and discusses how teachers can help. Some students, especially in the early grades, show…

Student retention has been a divisive educational question since the turn of the century. And although early educators found that retention was not particularly effective, they continued using it because their options were limited. Today, educators have many options to retention. Using the database from Project STAR, a study explored the common…

This document consists of a number of figures and diagrams suitable for overhead transparencies that illustrate and elaborate on the prnciples of failure-oriented training (a model for improving the effectiveness of instructional analysis). By adding a few simple steps to analysis, the resulting training will be closer to the idealized tutor:…