In 2008, the Washington State Legislature passed HB 2722, which called for the appointment of an Advisory Committee charged with creating a plan--which, when fully implemented, will close the education gap for African American students. Beginning in May 2008, the newly appointed HB 2722 Advisory Committee took on this challenging charge. Early in…

Little research has examined how low-income Asian American children are supported to achieve well in school. The authors used the notion of social capital to study higher versus lower achieving Chinese adolescents from low-income backgrounds. They found that families of higher-achieving adolescents built and used more effectively three kinds of…

Issues relating to the sexual behaviour and sexual health of young people consistently capture newspaper headlines in the UK. The present paper provides a qualitative analysis of national newspaper articles reporting on sex and relationship education (SRE) within the context of teenage pregnancy. Overall, conservative newspapers were generally…

This "Afterschool Action Kit" contains tips on what the community can do to support afterschool programs. The kit is a useful tool for parents, community members or practitioners, and gives advice on finding or starting a quality program, identifying program needs and what resources to tap for help. The kit notes that Americans agree that…

Many nations, including the United States, have had to make difficult decisions that often affect educational equity. This article addresses three controversial issues--parental contributions to public schools, student tracking, and testing practices--by comparing policies in South Africa, England, and China with those in the United States.

This article describes the power of goal-setting in order to help children become self-motivated and responsible for their actions. It also provides a road-map for a successful process by describing the following strategies: changing negative thoughts into positives, creating affirmations, designing action plans and utilizing visualization. This…

Practice in working with parents is changing and communicating with parents is increasingly a part of teachers' responsibilities. Besides focusing on supporting their children's learning, many schools now involve parents in education for themselves. Yet despite the expectation that they will work to engage parents in their children's learning, in…

The decentralization of the power of school governance is one of the recent trends of educational development in a global society in which the notion of parents as stakeholders and partners of state education is being gradually recognized, albeit at different paces, in several Asian countries. This paper attempts to analyze the chronological…

This study examined the effects of peer groups on changes in academic engagement in 11- to 13-year-old children. From the entire cohort of 366 sixth graders in a town, 87% participated at the beginning and end of the school year. Peer groups were assessed using socio-cognitive mapping; as an indicator of motivation, teachers reported on students'…

The authors address the "whys" and "hows" of encouraging independent reading at home. Practical tips that teachers can give to parents are provided.

About eight years ago, the National School Boards Association, along with local school board members, created the Key Work of School Boards, a framework of eight areas that school boards can use in their efforts to improve student achievement. The eight areas are vision, standards, assessment, accountability, alignment, climate, collaborative…

How to design environmental education (EE) programs in ways that encourage children to influence the environmental knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors of adults has intrigued researchers for more than a decade. The authors review and synthesize results from 7 studies that sought to answer this question. The studies reviewed were conducted between…

The dictum that "context matters" notwithstanding, few researchers have focused on how social capital affects educational outcomes for ethnic groups outside of the United States. Using German Socioeconomic Panel (GSOEP) data, analyses highlight the group-specific effects of parental social capital on track placement among 11-16-year-old…

Background/Context: There is much rhetoric regarding "parents and teachers as partners" despite little evidence that such partnerships, as described in the early childhood education literature, actually develop. The literature on parent-teacher partnerships does not examine parents' and teachers' interactions or what those interactions mean to…

Despite the powers that parents are endowed with regarding governance of schools in South Africa, they are not yet given sufficient room and space to deliberate on issues of school governance; instead they are still excluded by some teaching staff who deny them (explicitly or implicitly) from taking part in crucial decisions affecting education of…