Comprehensive school reform efforts are an increasingly visible part of the educational landscape. Policymakers, educators, and researchers are eager to assess the effectiveness of these models, especially regarding their utility in the most troubled settings. This paper reports results from one such reform, the Talent Development Middle School…

Provides public and system policy recommendations to state and local elected officials, governing bodies, and administrators responsible for the changes needed to create an integrated, comprehensive workforce development system that will sustain California's economic growth. Public policy recommendations include: workforce development services…

Local schools and school districts lack organized information on school effectiveness to select programs and practices to meet their specific program improvement and implementation needs. Critical program features, implementation and training requirements, program costs, program-delivery systems, program impacts, and a host of other relevant…

Plain Talk is a community-based initiative designed to assist neighborhood groups and residents in creating and implementing locally acceptable and effective strategies to protect sexually active youth from pregnancy. Plain Talk aims to affect individual, neighborhood, and community behavior through a process that focuses on helping adults develop…

The second research and evaluation conference of the Annie E. Casey Foundation attracted many participants from the public and private sectors. In spite of their diverse backgrounds and approaches to evaluation, the participants shared a sense that researchers and evaluators need to find better ways to collect and use information. The primary…

This study is a retrospective examination of elements that influenced one elementary school staff to initiate and implement a school-wide innovation in their reading program in 1990-91. This school served 315 preschool children through grade three in a small town set in the rural countryside. Case study methodology was used to discover how the…

Reading Recovery has proved to be an effective intervention for meeting the needs of at-risk first graders. When Reading Recovery is not fully implemented in a school, the teacher then assumes responsibility for intervention. This project addresses how a regular education, first grade classroom teacher can best meet the needs of first grade…

In responding to the emerging challenges to education in Asia and the Pacific in this new century, this Asia-Pacific Programme of Educational Innovation for Development (APEID) book series, "Educational Innovation for Development," is launched to reflect a knowledge base of rethinking on roles of education in development. The series…

During the 2000-2001 school year, the Washington State Institute for Public Policy conducted a study of how public high schools in Washington State are responding to state education reform. One aspect of the study was the experiences of high schools with various strategies to increase student engagement in learning. This paper summarizes study…

Recognizing the importance of the need for effective career planning, the United States Army, in conjunction with the Council of Economic Development, conducted a forum to focus on this issue. What emerged was a program called Planning for Life, which annually recognizes outstanding career planning programs at the state and national level. The…

This is a report on a workshop held in Hawaii with representatives from United States community college and the Thai Ministry of Education to help form the East-West Consortium for Community College Development in Thailand. Recommendations from the workshop included plans for a U.S. community college training team to visit Thailand and help begin…

In the year 2000, the Southern Regional Task Force on Child Care was formed with representatives from 16 southern states and the District of Columbia as well as appointments from the Southern Institute on Children and Families and the Southern Growth Policies Board to collaborate in developing an action plan to improve access to child care…

This article argues that the standard tenets of the teaching of children also apply to the ways in which programs are implemented: they run on tentativeness, flexibility, and problem-solving. How these qualities reveal themselves in five important areas is discussed in the following sections: (1) standards and guidelines for delivering Reading…

This brochure describes the Challenging Athletes Minds for Personal Success (CHAMPS)/Life Skills program that was launched by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) in 1994. The program was created to support the student development initiatives of its member institutions and to enhance the quality of the student-athlete experience…

The Diversified Education through Leadership, Technology, and Academics (DELTA) program of the Austin Independent School District (AISD), Texas, serves students at each of the AISD 10 regular high schools. The goal of this open-entry, open-exit, competency-based diploma program is to recover former dropouts and to prevent students at risk of…