Buying students with academic scholarships is self-defeating. It is unfair to students paying full price, unjust awards undermine reputation, competition can spiral, students are counseled to choose schools for aid alone, and parents are offended when scholarships are not offered and when their "scholarship" students get average grades. (MSE)

This series outlines sport opportunities for athletes with disabilities. Included are articles discussing sports for athletes with cerebral palsy, deaf athletes, blind athletes, wheelchair bound athletes, amputee athletes, as well as a discussion of the Special Olympics. (JMK)

Describes four strategies that employ competition as a means to motivate remedial readers to practice decoding. Discusses the value of competition as well as cautions to be exercised in using it. (FL)

Looks at the process of educational decline; proposes a free market system with tax vouchers for private schools; and claims that teacher unions, particularly the National Education Association, are the major reason for the deteriorating quality of public education. (MLF)

Analyzes six myths about education and explores their justifications. The underlying assumptions are unsupported by educational research. A bibliography containing 71 citations is appended. (MD)

A program called OM (originally titled Olympics of the Mind), aimed at encouraging creativity in gifted and talented students via the industrial arts curriculum, is examined. Creative problem solving is discussed and examples of problems and format are included. Program effectiveness and public relations are described in detail. (CT)

Compares American and Chinese school-age (K-2) children's cooperative-competitive behavior using a puzzle completion task. No significant cultural differences between the two groups' cooperative and competitive behaviors were found. Variance analyses indicated that children in the higher grades performed more cooperatively than children in the…

A Massachusetts school faced with low teacher and student morale as a result of severe budget cuts initiated a year-long competitive program to improve school morale. The program was successful and virtually cost-free. (MD)

One of the consequences of recent changes in Czech society and education is that schools are more than ever expected to be able to gain support for their activities, searching for them over and above the regular extra-school grant resources. It seems that today's opportunities of grant and foundation support to Czech schools are quite varied. The…

The author forthrightly declares in this book of essays on school reform that teachers are no more saintly than anyone else, that poor schools should be closed and lousy teachers should be fired, that philanthropy may sometimes do more harm than good, that teaching experience is not essential to being a school principal, that schools should be…

This paper reviews the use of a segregation ratio in analyzing changes in the pattern of socioeconomic segregation between schools in England and Wales, addressing how the modifiable areal unit problem affects results. Researchers are developing methods for assessing socioeconomic stratification among school admissions and for comparing those…

This paper focuses on collaboration and cooperation as aspects of higher education in California, considering the three public systems and the independent sector. The context is the 40-year experience of growth and change in these 4 segments of higher education since the enactment of California's 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education. The first…

A study was conducted on the influence of female athletes' dispositional and situational tendencies on the selection of sources of sport confidence. It hypothesized that task orientation and perceptions of mastery climate would be positively associated with the selection of maladaptive or normative sources of confidence. Participants were 180…

Utility services (telecommunications, power, water, and gas) throughout the world were traditionally provided by large, usually state-owned, monopolies. However, encouraged by technological change, regulatory innovation, and pressure from international organizations, many developing countries are privatizing state-owned companies and introducing…

Effective academic advising is recognized as key to college student success and academic retention (Pascarella & Terenzini, 1991; Mastrodicasa, 2001). There are at least seven different structural models for academic advising; each depends to a greater or lesser degree on a level of "engagement" by faculty in the process (Kramer,…