Summarizes a case involving a district's alleged violation of a neurologically impaired student's rights under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and the Rehabilitation Act (Section 504). The Third Circuit Court ruled that IDEA's "stay-put" rule did not excuse the district from developing a timely individualized education plan.…

Teacher evaluation is problematic because it combines two conflicting tasks: improving instruction and judging performance. A Boston elementary principal gradually devised an informal supervision/evaluation system involving brief, random, and frequent classroom visits followed by praise, affirmation, suggestions, and constructive criticism. Even…

In a series of letters, a veteran high school English teacher advises a student teacher to tell students the "big reasons" for learning; control her workload by increasing students' learning responsibility; plan lessons based on weekly schedules and meaningful writing assignments; and avoid exhaustion by streamlining classroom rules, evading petty…

Describes the author's three-month career as a student teacher of social studies and art in an upstate New York high school. As his stint progresses, he realizes he cannot continue to rely on his old ways of thinking and functioning. He learns to handle a cooperating teacher's unrealistic expectations and to engage students with audiovisuals and…

Despite promising research findings and enthusiastic participants, multiyear teacher/student relationships remain uncommon in U.S. schools. The multiyear approach offers great potential for summertime learning. Ambitious pilot programs in Attleboro and Worcester, Massachusetts, and West Bloomfield, Minnesota, are briefly described. (MLH)

Describes how a typical high school in Huntington Beach, California, curbed disruptive student behavior by personalizing the school experience for "problem" students. Through mostly volunteer efforts, an adopt-a-kid program was initiated that matched kids' learning styles to adults' personality styles and resulted in fewer suspensions and numerous…

Research shows that poor student-teacher relations adversely affect students' self-concept. Teachers at a Florida high school created positive advisor/advisee relationships for a group of high-risk students with grade-point averages of 1.5 or below. After 21 weeks, these students had better attendance and grade-point averages than control-group…

Compares pedagogical practices in an eighth-grade middle school classroom with those a of one-room Amish school studied in an earlier work. Taken together, the two settings suggest that one must seek "the present status and performance of the U.S. education system" not in the usual indicators, but in the contradictory beliefs and assumptions of…

Educators can resolve the perennial conflict between those wanting to spare students the stigma of failure and those concerned with maintaining standards by adopting Carl Washburne's evaluation method. During the 1920s, Washburne proposed "adjusting the school to the child" by individualizing instruction and using evaluation to discover how to…

A primary school in Cali, Colombia, has implemented major changes intended to give students a more active role in their education. Encouraged by new government guidelines, teachers banished letter grades and began to assess students on mastery of curriculum objectives. During parent-teacher conferences, children speak confidently about their…

An Idaho education dean recounts a moving encounter with a fatherless first-grader while visiting his grandson in Eugene, Oregon. Envisioning a deadbeat dad and a burned-out mother, he pondered the statistical odds of this child graduating from college. However, the girl's warm welcome from her teacher helped revise his hopes about the little…

Education majors need an updated field experience aimed at studying adolescents from diverse cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds. Visiting a local shopping mall on a Friday night to observe teens in their natural habitat is entertaining and enlightening. By surveying kids, college students can find out what teens value and examine their own…

Two judgments frame current professional development concerns: teacher learning as the heart of any educational reform effort, and inservice training as sorely inadequate. Existing professional development resources are meager and ineffectively deployed. This article introduces a special "Kappan" section that explores promising alternative…

A longitudinal investigation of the ways policymakers and practitioners in California, Michigan, and South Carolina view curricular reform in elementary mathematics and literacy instruction shows the complexities involved in "updating" teachers' professional development. Curriculum standards and frameworks are no substitute for the enormous amount…

Using teachers' professional development as its central strategy, California's Middle Grades Mathematical Renaissance project aims to transform its mathematics program so that all students become empowered mathematically. This article discusses key questions concerning the program's resources, strategies, leadership roles, and monitoring…