Father Bruce Wellems didn't know the dropout statistics when he came to Back of the Yards in 1990 to serve as a parish priest. Born and raised in New Mexico, Wellems initially had only vague notions of what an inner-city ministry might look like and little commitment to the neighborhood's struggling youth. But after some prodding from a local park…

How welcome parents and carers feel at their children's school seems likely to have a significant influence on the degree to which they and their children engage with its educational programme. The ethos of the school and the nature of the classroom environment as determined by teachers are therefore significant and continuing features of its…

History shows that education cannot be its own vehicle. It has to depend on the hinterland formed by its users--students, teachers and parents. Critical evaluation throughout history, however, has shown that it is these very users who are least consulted in the structuring of education. In this article, the authors describe an experiential…

The purpose of the present study is to determine the prevalence of depressive symptoms among senior high school students preparing national university entrance examination (OSS) in Turkey. The authors conducted a survey during the second term of students' senior year at high school, a time when they were exposed to a stressful standardized…

Social exclusion is a serious social problem. Not "fitting in" at school may be an experience that can scar children psychologically for life. This is unsurprising since being part of the "in crowd" (i.e. accepted in-group members) is extremely important to children and adolescents. Being rejected by one's peers can cause an increase in antisocial…

Despite the 150 years of British colonial governance in Hong Kong, Chinese collectivist culture continues to be a dominant source of influence in the learning context of students (Cheng, 1998; Salili, Lai and Leung, 2004; Tao and Hong, 2000), placing a great emphasis on education and effort (Salili and Lai, 2003). Education is viewed as the…

Educators in the Northern Plains have long discussed dropout rates among American Native youth. Human potential is lost in allowing any one American Native student to drop out of school. The problems among this group of adolescents are apparent, yet nebulous. This document investigates the complexities of achieving school success among American…

The transition from high school to adult life is an exciting time for many young people. Youth from high poverty backgrounds, however, are considered at-risk for a host of unfavorable outcomes including academic failure, school dropout, drug abuse, unemployment and incarceration. These adolescents are more likely than their more affluent peers to…

Alternative education programmes, in the form of vocational education and flexible or personalised curricula, are rapidly becoming established as a main plank in both mainstream and special schools' responses to pupil disaffection. In this paper, "alternative curriculum" will be used as an umbrella term to include all forms of curricula which are…

The interaction between gender, race, and poverty and its effect on children's education is multidimensional and complex, but there are certain generalizations that can be made. The first is that women worldwide are known to be poorer than men (Buvinic and Gupta, 1997). Women in the US are 25-30% more likely to be poorer than men (U.S. Bureau of…

Over a 27-year teaching career in schools in North London and the Zambian bush I have relished the challenge of helping the disaffected or reluctant learner. Most of my teaching was in the area of business and vocational education, where learners have often been placed not through choice but because they were not seen as high enough achievers to…

The experience that will be described in this paper is based on work carried out during the Chance Project, an experimental programme designed to re-integrate teenage drop-outs from difficult areas of the inner city into mainstream school. The Project, which has been running in Naples, southern Italy, since 1998, comprises three school centres…

The establishment of the UK government's OFSTED (school inspection service), published league tables, standardised testing, the literacy and numeracy strategy, imposed external targets for improvement, performance related pay and the gifted and talented programme, show the present government's concerns with educational improvement. Schools have…

For the last four years the author has been involved with the design, administration and writing up of the results of competency tests which have been conducted for Grades 3 (ages 8-9)and 6 (ages 11-12) in his home province of the Western Cape, South Africa. In the course of this work, he and some of his colleagues working on this project have had…

The UK-I-Can Program is an adaptation of the Amer-I-Can Program, introduced in 1988 to help individuals meet their full potential and improve the quality of their lives. The focus of the program is equipping young people with life management skills necessary to lead fulfilling and productive lives, based on the belief that individuals' self-esteem…