A top aide to Vice President Gore has been chosen to lead the U.S. Department of Education's effort to modernize delivery of financial aid to students and colleges. His office is the first federal government entity to be run as a "performance-based organization." Some fear he may politicize the office that lawmakers specified be led by a…

Public support for improving public schools over seeking alternatives remains high (70%). Opposition to private contracting is growing. Fully 79% of public-school parents think schools effectively prepare students for the labor market; 72% want higher promotion standards. Inadequate discipline, violence, and scanty funding remain top problems.…

Responding to a report on the Clinical Research Training Program of the National Institutes of Health, the author finds that the low applicant rate among dental students is due less to lack of interest in the program or its emphasis on research but more to a program structure modeled on a medical school rather than a dental school curriculum. (MSE)

Discusses the increasing demand for digital reference services from government Web sites via email, and describes a partnership between the Government Printing Office and the federal depository library at the University of Illinois at Chicago to create electronic access to the Department of State Foreign Affairs Network (DOSFAN). (Author/LRW)

Examines the interplay between the federal Title I schoolwide program and the first 2 years of a systemwide reform, Children Achieving, in high-poverty, urban Philadelphia schools. In spite of intense institutional competition and contention at the district level, there were major efforts to facilitate policy coordination at different levels of…

Explores the Johnson administration's most provocative innovation, the Community Action Program (CAP), and how its philosophy of "maximum feasible participation" furthered tribal self-determination. Examines the long-term impacts of CAPs and other Office of Economic Opportunity initiatives related to Head Start, Rough Rock Demonstration…

Reviews three reports, available from the George Lucas Educational Foundation (www.glef.org), on the use of technology in schools: "E-Learning: Putting A World-Class Education at the Fingertips of Children"; "The Power of the Internet for Learning: Moving from Promise to Practice"; and "The Future of Children: Children and Computer Technology."…

When Jackson State University officials and their collaborators assembled a proposal for a $12 million social and behavioral research center to combat terrorism, they hoped Federal officials would give a nod of approval to what they believed was a high-value concept. The proposal, Featuring the predominantly White Mississippi State University as…

Early Head Start, a federal program begun in 1995 for low-income pregnant women and families with infants and toddlers, was evaluated through a randomized trial of 3,001 families in 17 programs. Interviews with primary caregivers, child assessments, and observations of parent-child interactions were completed when children were 3 years old.…

This study examined the first-year college experience of students from migrant farmworker families. Data were obtained through a written survey and subsequent small group interviews with 13 participants in a federally supported program for students from farmworker backgrounds. Information regarding the students' decisions to pursue a college…

This publication is part of a series of tools and resources on financing and sustaining youth programming. These tools and resources are intended to help policymakers, program developers, and community leaders develop innovative strategies for implementing, financing, and sustaining effective programs and policies. This strategy brief presents a…

This article discusses how federal and state governments can improve student access to private and public higher education institutions. Florida helps to achieve that with a common course-numbering system across community and four-year colleges, which permits students to easily transfer credits. Both the Senate and the House of Delegates in…

The primary purpose of this study was to determine if there were commonalities in the approaches of 10 elementary school principals in the state of Florida identified as "success stories" in leading reading improvement in their schools in 2002, shortly after enactment of the No Child Left Behind Act at the national level and the Just…

This article reports that educators and experts across the country who work with English-language learners (ELLs) are moving toward a consensus that the federal Reading First program needs to be refined to become more effective for children acquiring English. Administrators in several big-city districts with large numbers of such students are…

Kentucky has developed an assessment and accountability system that provides outcome data for a set of state early childhood standards for children birth to 5 years of age that are aligned with early childhood outcomes designated by the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP). Within this flexible and comprehensive state assessment system,…