This report highlights four urban comprehensive secondary schools that are developing, implementing, and evaluating reform initiatives that include vocational and technical education as a key component of these efforts. Efforts of these four high schools are described: Bryan High School, Omaha, Nebraska; Humboldt Secondary Complex, St. Paul,…

The challenges of burgeoning enrollment and the high concentration of lower-income and ethnic minority students, a climate of low expectations, teacher and student mobility, and increasing drop-out rates, led to the formation of the Houston (Texas) Consortium of Urban Professional Development Centers. The consortium focuses on urban schools; it…

The individual responsible for spearheading reform for the education of limited-English-proficient (LEP) students in Linda Vista Elementary School (San Diego, California) describes the process, issues, and outcomes of the initiative in this theme issue. Linda Vista Elementary School has a student population that is 77 percent LEP. The personalized…

Rural communities have strengths and weaknesses that affect the development of transitional programs for students with disabilities. These community characteristics were factored into a federally funded, graduate-level training program called Project CREST (Collaboration in Rural Education for Special Teachers), which provided training stipends…

Phoenix Elementary School District #1 began implementing its Competency Based Guidance Program (CBGP) during the 1991-92 school year after being awarded a U.S. Department of Education Drug Free Schools and Communities Programs Grant. The purpose of CBGP was to provide middle-school students with a developmental and proactive guidance program.…

Pregnant and parenting adolescents represent a unique and challenging problem for educational systems. Of the 17,051 women who become pregnant every day in America, 2,795 or 16% of them are adolescents. The self-esteem and locus of control of 85 pregnant and parenting teens enrolled in the Ohio Graduation, Reality, Dual Role Skills (GRADS) Program…

Community-based programming (CBP) is a cooperative process in which a community college serves as the leader and catalyst in effecting collaboration among the people, leaders and community organizations in its service area. This report discusses the changing role of the community college, the nature of CBP, and expected outcomes of the process,…

This report stresses the importance of creating networks of community support for young adolescents during nonschool hours. It pays special attention to the needs and interests of youth from low-income families and of diverse backgrounds. The first part of the report deals with the risks and opportunities faced by youth today at home and school…

This paper addresses the basic critical elements of teacher education reform and describes a rigorous university teacher education professional school and program which not only prepares future teachers in academics, pedagogy, and technology, but also prepares them to become productive participants in a changing society. The paper argues that the…

This program review examined the Colleges of Education in six of Florida's nine State University System (SUS) universities. The review was designed to assess the strength and effectiveness of the colleges and their teacher preparation programs, to evaluate the extent to which the colleges were meeting the objectives of university-wide planning,…

This report presents results of a project to identify alternative delivery systems for marketing education and to disseminate marketing education resource information. It describes project objectives and activities, including development of a regional delivery approach, preparation of trainers to conduct regional inservice meetings, and regional…

This report reviews a conference for researchers, administrators, planners, and practitioners from countries with varying socioeconomic and cultural systems to exchange ideas and experiences about youth programs designed to ease the transition from formal schooling to the workplace. Part I contains an overview of the conference proceedings and a…

The perspectives in these essays present an examination of the Kentucky educational reform effort, with an examination of its rationale, various facets, and the reactions to its implementation. The ambitious assessment system includes multiple-choice and open-ended items, performance tasks, and portfolio assessments. The following are included:…

This paper summarizes the results of a study of the local consequences of implementing statewide minimum competency tests. For American education to be the best in the world, the use of statewide and nationwide standardized testing as a primary policy tool for stimulating reform must be discontinued. Second, school district responses to such…

Since the mid-1980s two-way bilingual education programs have attracted renewed interest as an effective way to educate both language-minority and language-majority students. This report, which describes and assesses the current state of such programs in the United States, is based on data collected from 169 schools during the 1991-92, 1992-93,…