Urban districts throughout the nation are contending with declining enrollment, aging facilities in disrepair, persistently low student achievement, increased competition with charters, and severe fiscal constraints. Philadelphia is a case in point. Over the past year, the School District of Philadelphia (SDP) was forced to borrow $304 million…

School choice advocates often assume that market-like competition will create a dynamic K-12 educational environment that will result in improved outcomes. We critically examine this assumption and draw on the literature on market failure and social dilemmas to demonstrate that the market metaphor in a public schooling context has limited utility.…

Improving the involvement of families in the lives of school students in Russia can be achieved through the use of electronic communication, but only if teachers and parents are given the knowledge and motivation that are necessary to make greater use of the Internet.

A growing body of research has found community service learning to have a positive effect upon participating college students' civic development; however, far less scholarship has considered the impact of particular components of a community service learning program. This article presents two preliminary but promising strategies for enhancing the…

Despite the well-known benefits of parent involvement in children's education, research clearly shows that it is difficult to effectively involve parents. This study aims to capture parents' views of a Blog Based Parent Involvement Approach (BPIA) designed to secure parent involvement in education by strengthening school-parent communication. Data…

In this era of increased diversity in schools, educators may struggle with effective methods for partnering with all parents in their classroom. Although all educators work to engage families, meeting the needs of diverse families sometimes require specific strategies for engaging all families and facilitating their participation as respected…

Significant evidence suggests that parent participation and involvement are beneficial for student success. Latino parents, however, have historically been portrayed negatively in their role in their children's education. Deficit thinking paradigms have framed much of the negative depictions about Latino parents. This study proposes that the…

The role of the parent in a child's reading development requires consistent communication with educators about the child's individual needs and progress. National concern for declining reading scores throughout the country begins in the early childhood educational setting. This study, designed as an action research, explored one-way and two-way…

This study investigated the effects of a parent component to the IEP on parental involvement. In sum, six participants were involved in the 19-21 week study. The six participants all had a child being served on an IEP. After baseline data was collected, parents met with school personnel to take a goal from the IEP and create their own objective to…

The STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) attract many students with autism, ADD, affective disorders and related invisible disabilities who are highly intelligent and analytical, but who, upon entering higher education, may find that they struggle with independent living and a different way of learning. This is a preparation…

Parental involvement in their children's education programs is increasingly being encouraged and expected. Due to the flow of immigrants into U.S., the demographic nature of U.S. schools is changing with an increase in the number of children from diverse cultural groups served in special education. Among these cultural groups are immigrant…

The central goal of this study was to explore the influence of the African Caribbean students' home life on their chemistry achievement. The study utilizes a mixed-methods approach and two research designs. A quantitative correlational design (using Spearman Rho correlational analysis) and a phenomenological qualitative design were used. For the…

Getting more low-income and parents of color involved to a greater degree in their child's education seems to require some out of the box thinking. That's because even today most schools base such attempts on theories from the 1980s and 1990s that pre-date sophisticated research on parental involvement and are most applicable to white middle class…

We focused on coparenting support, partner relationship quality, and father engagement in families with young children that did not change structurally over 4 years of participation in the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing study (N = 1,756). There was a significantly stronger and more robust positive association between fathers' perceived…

Many researchers link social capital theory to education and commonly use examples from the field of education to examine social capital theory. Accordingly, they accept that reflections and contributions of social capital can be observed in the field of education. This paper examines social capital's effects on academic success in education. In…