A cornerstone of Mississippi's 1982 Education Reform Act, the Assistant Reading Instructor Program sought to improve basic skills acquisition by placing assistant reading instructors in primary grades. The program has not been effective in meeting its objectives. On standardized tests, students who had assistant reading instructors in the primary…

Prior to fall 1993, students at California's College of the Canyons had until the 11th or 12th week of a 17 or 18 week semester to drop or withdraw from a course. In spring 1993, the state Academic Senate recommended that the drop deadline be changed to the 8th week. Students were notified of the new withdrawal deadline on the college calendar, in…

With the current interest and allocation of resources accorded service learning comes a growing need to clarify the varied ideological perspectives on school and society that underline service learning activities and programs. Drawing on an evaluation of Stanford's Service Learning 2000 project and on a rhetorical analysis of policy talk on…

This document consists of the first three issues (1997 output) or the serial "Early Development." The publisher of this journal, the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has more than 60 state and federally funded projects, most of which focus on early childhood development of…

This study examined the impact of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in University of Pennsylvania v. EEOC as it applies to tenure/promotion practices and the disclosure of peer evaluation information. The 1990 decision ordered the university to turn over confidential tenure files to the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) pursuant…

This note series is intended to summarize lessons learned and key policy findings on the World Bank's work in education. Over the past 20 years China's education sector has provided many lessons for countries that are approaching Universal Primary Education (UPE). The most important lesson may be that the need for educational reform does not…

Addressed to both social scientists and to nonacademic readers, this book provides an overview of the United States child care market, analyzes the main aspects of child care and child care policy, and proposes a new child care policy. The main thesis of the book is that the child care market functions much better than is commonly believed.…

Immigration and domestic industrial policies have been powerful instruments in the creation of immigrant "niches" in labor markets. While Indians have clustered in the information technology industry, Mexicans have formed niches in low-skilled industries such as agriculture. A review of the relationship between immigration policy and the…

This paper explores the impact of policies and institutions on employment and unemployment of OECD countries in the past decades. Reduced-form unemployment equations, consistent with standard wage setting/price-setting models, are estimated using cross-country/time-series data from 21 OECD countries over the period 1982-2003. In the…

Rather than promote access, college admissions and financial aid processes often create a series of barriers that the poorest student must overcome to get to college. The Center for Higher Education Policy Analysis (CHEPA) of the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California directed a three-year research initiative,…

As with so many guides for school improvement, the U.S. Department of Education's March 2006 Non-regulatory Guidance document entitled, "Designing Schoolwide Programs," continues to marginalize the essential role of student/learning supports. This brief report analyzes the guidance document with a specific focus on how to ensure Title I schoolwide…

Over the past decade, the standards-based reform movement in education has focused attention on the responsibility of schools and school systems to produce results in student learning. Nationally this focus is most evident with the implementation of accountability provisions of the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001. However, even…

In May 1997, USAID's Center for Development Information and Evaluation (CDIE) launched the initiative, "Focus on Girls: An Evaluation of USAID Programs and Policies in Education." The effort included five Impact Evaluations, including this study in Guinea (Guatemala, Malawi, Nepal, and Pakistan were the others). This Impact Evaluation…

This paper outlines the argument that there is a convergence of curricular goals across early childhood services in all European countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and a move to define more clearly the developmental goals and outcomes that services should achieve; the trend is positive for both children…

The fall 2001 issue of New Directions for Community Colleges discusses the changes in policy and practice of vocational education at community colleges. The 10 chapters included in this volume are: (1) "Opportunities and Challenges for the New Vocationalism" by Debra D. Bragg; (2) "The Role of Leadership in Successful Vocational Initiatives" by…