An ethnographic study in two California school districts examines how court cases, federal and state legislation, local and state school board decisions, election results, and national reports interacted to constrain students' confidence to function at a particular level in English and the learning opportunities that a bilingual teacher could…

Reports on the similarities and differences between educational use and business use of technology-based distance learning. Topics discussed include organizational infrastructure; cost effectiveness; program assessment models; higher education institutions providing distance learning to businesses; faculty and management acceptance; policy…

Ways in which urban schools respond to and are affected by the urban environment are explored through a case study analysis of a middle school in Oakland (California). As the only public agency charged with serving all young people, the urban school can play a leading role in urban revitalization. (SLD)

Three faculty workload planning methods in United Kingdom universities are compared, focusing on workload planning principles, computerized decision support, institutional contexts, political dimensions, and management of change. One is based on contact hours; the second on actual hours; and the third on translating supervision, teaching,…

Describes positive results coming from Trinity University's active support of educational reform efforts at Hawthorne Elementary School (Houston, Texas). Trinity's teacher education agenda focused on preparing teachers for the real world of the elementary school and pursuing a teacher-selected school reform project. (GR)

Provides an evaluator's view of the quantitative effects of the Core Knowledge Sequence, a content-based K-6 curriculum model, and other reforms at Hawthorne Elementary School (Houston, Texas). Pretest and posttest results show increased academic performance in reading, writing, and mathematics, based on Texas Assessment of Academic Skills…

Reports on a study of a collaborative relationship between faculty at the University of Michigan and teachers and students at a comprehensive urban high school. The ethical and epistemological (validity) considerations have to do with using high school students as paid coresearchers. The study is illustrated with excerpts from student meetings and…

Focuses on a low-performing school district to review the problems of school reform and accountability, and to reveal the set of prevailing conditions and themes that make change more complicated. It is argued that the politics of race, poverty, the vacuums in communication and leadership, and the uncritical mass of human resources dramatically…

When young people are provided with the means to effectively reach political decision makers and influence them, there is hope to make them participate in politics and to revitalize democracy. This paper presents the conceptual design of an Internet-based system intended to enable such participation; the presentation is illustrated with the case…

Notes that young adolescents arrive at school greatly influenced by their home environments and are then influenced by school experiences. Notes that students with risk factors at home and school have difficulty succeeding. Recounts story of a young adolescent male to illustrate impact of school and home on school performance, highlighting the…

This article provides a case study of monocultural personnel preparation, discusses various cultural beliefs about disability, and examines the effect of the dualities and dichotomies of parent/professional beliefs about childhood disabilities. In addition, it discusses intervention concerns in developing countries such as Turkey, Ecuador, and…

Over the past decade, the concept of "community" has been at the center of reform in literacy education. Most literacy educators agree that community-oriented environments are critical for students' literacy learning, yet many have difficulty building these communities in multicultural and multilingual classrooms. In this article we draw upon the…

As a less expensive "close approximation," case studies are becoming increasingly common in courses in educational psychology, child development, and related disciplines. Typically case studies take the form of narratives depicting realistic classroom situations and problems. A case study does not have to be a narrative, however. Children's and…

This interpretive case study describes a collaborative project involving a physics professor and a science educator. We report what was learned about factors that influenced the professor's development of teaching strategies, alternative to lecture, that were intended to promote prospective teachers' meaningful learning and their use of canonical…

We studied the outcome of a professional development opportunity that consisted of 2-week-long resident institutes for teams consisting of a secondary science teacher and two students. The science content of the National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded professional development institute was monarch butterfly ecology. The first institute took place…