This report reviews what is known about today's proprietary schools, their role in higher education, their curricula, the types of students who attend them, educational outcomes of their graduates, and the policy issues that effect them. First, the report discusses the historical aspects of how private career schools evolved from the colonial era…

This study reports results of the first year of implementation of the Success for All elementary school restructuring program in kindergarten through third grade at Philadelphia's Francis Scott Key Elementary School. Fifty-two percent of the students were from Asian backgrounds, primarily Cambodian, and spoke little or no English at home. In the…

The Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS) examined the demands of the workplace and whether young people were capable of meeting those demands. Specifically, SCANS determined the level of skills required to enter employment. Fundamental changes in the nature of work were identified; these changes were found to hold…

During the 1988-89 school year, 55 Writing to Read (WTR) labs were installed in Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia elementary schools, as the result of a partnership between the Appalachian Regional Commission and the IBM Corporation. This report evaluates the WTR program implemented in 13 southern West Virginia rural schools with poor,…

In collaborative learning, both facilitators and learners are active participants in the process, a sense of community is created, and knowledge is considered to be located in the community rather than the individual. Its guiding principle is that learning is enhanced when knowledge that is created and transmitted is shaped by the activities and…

This paper reviews the extent to which students with disabilities attending regular secondary schools were involved in vocational education, and whether students who participated in vocational education exhibited better outcomes both in school and in the first years after high school. Data from the National Longitudinal Transition Study of Special…

Prior to college-level mathematics coursework, students are not routinely provided with the opportunity to engage in the kind of sustained mathematical thinking necessary to solve complex, multistep problems, most likely because of the difficulties that school mathematics teachers face in communicating problem settings and contexts that are…

The effect of institutions on school effectiveness is explored in this book, which argues that school reforms in the United States are destined to fail because of the failure to address the root of the problem, which is found in the institutions of direct democratic control by which schools have traditionally been governed. Methodology involved…

Recommendations by the National Council on Education Standards and Testing (NCEST) are provided concerning whether national standards and a system of assessments are desirable and feasible and how national standards and a system of assessments are to be developed and implemented. The NCEST found that the absence of explicit national standards…

This report presents national data for 1990 on high school dropout and retention rates. The report uses the Current Population Survey and the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988. The three types of dropout rates discussed are: (1) event rates, (2) status rates, and (3) cohort rates. The report also examines high school completion and…

A study examined the effectiveness of IBM's (International Business Machines') "Writing to Read" (WTR) program in teaching kindergartners and first graders to read. Scores of 257 kindergarten students (enrolled in 2 experimental and 2 control schools) on the California Achievement Test were used to determine if the WTR program was more effective…

This report presents detailed tabulations of data on school enrollment of the civilian non-institutional population in October 1989. It also includes summary time series of data collected since the beginning of the survey. Data are from the October school enrollment supplement to the Current Population Survey (CPS). Data on school enrollment have…

Detailed evidence is presented about the extent of generalization from high-stakes tests to other tests and about the instructional effects of high-stakes testing. Data are from grade 3 of a large, high-poverty urban district with large numbers of Black and Hispanic American students. The district's results in 1990 for two tests, designated Test B…

This book has a two-fold purpose. First, it was intended as a description of the development and testing of a primary school fraction program, presently in practice. This project seeks to develop a realistic alternative to the teaching and learning of fractions. The second purpose was to produce a theory on the teaching and learning of fractions…

This book represents a compilation of the views and ideas of the late Hans Freudenthal, representing his last major contribution to the field of mathematics education. Rather than a presentation of new views, Freudenthal selected and streamlined old ideas, many gathered from his lectures in China, and formed a review of questions and issues in…