As families and institutions change, many U.S. children could fail to realize their potential to lead fulfilling adult lives. Confronted by poverty, the crack cocaine epidemic, and increased exposure to violence, children make daily choices altering their life's course. Schools are increasingly expected to resolve social problems without…

A California English teacher explores the school safety issue for both innercity and suburban high schools students. Wearing certain sports team jackets can place kids in danger; girls degrade themselves by keeping gang members' drugs and guns in their lockers. Schools can help reclaim the "Great Disconnected" by developing community-based…

According to an Oregon longitudinal study, the single best predictor of adolescent criminal behavior is a long-established pattern of early school antisocial behavior. The most promising intervention programs feature a strong family component and direct intervention procedures simultaneously applied to the student's school behavior. A sidebar…

Interagency collaboration to serve youngsters' needs should be comprehensive, preventive, child-centered, and flexible. Streamlining collaboration involves mapping the territory, surveying the field, reviewing current needs and services, developing a plan, and getting started. Pitfalls include talking without acting, creating an interagency czar…

Aided by the First Presbyterian Church, the Dallas Jewish Coalition for the Homeless, numerous business and service groups, individual volunteers, and shelters, City Park School in innercity Dallas has become an exemplary program for homeless students. School and community partnerships can form an extended family for needy students. A sidebar…

Educators should stop seeing self-esteem only in individualistic terms and move toward an integrated view of self and social relations. To enhance self-esteem, schools must value authentic participation, collaborative action, a problem-centered curriculum, and interdependent diversity and banish tracking, autocratic procedures, unicultural…

Many educators are quick to insult the skill and hard work of teachers such as Abdulalim Shabazz and Jaime Escalante by labeling them "charismatic." Deep restructuring means drawing up an appropriate vision of human potential, of aiming for the stars and tapping the vast capabilities of children and the teachers who serve them. (three references)…

Although Reuven Feuerstein's programs for culturally deprived, retarded, and autistic children have taken him 50 years to refine, this aging practitioner/philosopher/scholar looks forward to making further breakthroughs in helping "hopeless" youngsters grow and prosper. His Learning Potential Assessment Device, instead of pegging individuals,…

When children of literate elite need help, their parents can furnish what school has missed. When children of print poor need help, they have nowhere to turn. To break the illiteracy cycle, schools must help parents understand how to help their children at home. Sidebars describe the Megaskills program and show how teachers can foster family…

Family literacy models are as diverse as their participants. The best way to involve a student in literacy is to involve the parents in their own literacy. As a child's first teachers, parents are uniquely qualified to pass on a rich literary legacy through a shared literacy experience. The Parents and Literacy (PAL) program in Tucson, Arizona, is…

Although there is no lack of interest in social action among children, educators often lack necessary skills and experience. Teaching citizenship involvement requires not a new curriculum, but extension of a subject into real life. To succeed, teachers must grasp four concepts (problem, process, products, and presentation) hinging on students'…

Teachers can seize "teachable moments" to impart knowledge, challenge false assumptions, and encourage thoughtfulness about sex-related behaviors. English and social studies teachers have countless opportunities to address adolescent sexuality issues. Once educators accept responsibility for educating children to survive in a sexually exploitative…

Although educators seem reluctant to integrate sex into the curriculum, covert sexual instruction comprises a large part of the hidden curriculum and ambience of any junior or high school. When presenting heterosexual mechanics, most health classes bypass homosexuality, safer sex practices, abortion ethics, and birth control methods. Honest…

Comprehensive sexuality education and education for a democracy have many important common features. They both seek to help individuals maintain physical and mental health, form and maintain stable relationships, develop decision-making skills, and develop a toleration for diversity. Sexuality education should encourage freedom of thought--not…

Based on a 1988 study of adolescents and parents from six ethnic populations, this article recommends that educators and other service providers offer sexuality education in bilingual students' own language, focus on negotiation of relationships, provide inexpensive condoms, establish peer education networks and adult workshops, and collaborate…