Perhaps the greatest challenge facing educators of today is to create and sustain high-quality educational environments for low-income students and students of color. The Boston Pilot Schools Network, a network of eleven small, innovative schools within the Boston Public Schools, can be a model for other schools and districts as to how to create…

Massachusetts is a newcomer to teacher testing, and prospective teachers in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts were not tested until April 1998. The unintended consequences of the state's teacher testing policy are examined through a qualitative case study and a document review of media reports, higher education institution reports, in-house…

This paper describes a unit of instruction about media images--how they work, ways they affect people, and means to use them--in which young adolescents learn the consequences of becoming a media-literate consumer. The paper explains that in the unit, divided into 2 "clusters," 110 Boston-area eighth graders share 5 core academic…