This issue of On Research and Leadership Update (v13 n1) focuses on the concerns surrounding dual enrollment and dual credit. "Dual Enrollment Programs: Assessing the American Dream," by Katherine Boswell, addresses the problems inherent in development of these programs when institutions fail to collaborate with one another in an effective way.…

This document discusses community college governance. Because the challenges to governance are many, a solution to one problem could aggravate another and create new (and sometimes greater) difficulties for the college and those it serves. It would be better to have a full grasp of the problems before considering how they might all be solved.…

While the promotion of literacy is a fundamental mission for all librarians, over the past decades the definition has expanded and, paradoxically, fragmented into various multiliteracies, such as computer literacy, visual literacy, media literacy, and so forth. From these, a broader concept of student competencies, one that includes both…

Despite steadily increasing urgency about the nation's lowest-performing schools--those in the bottom five percent--efforts to turn these schools around have largely failed. Marginal change has led to marginal (or no) improvement. These schools, the systems supporting them, and the management of the change process require fundamental rethinking,…

"Collaboration" appears to be a popular trend in business and education as it is discussed more and more frequently in publications. One of the problems associated with collaboration is the lack of clear definition among similar terms such as cooperation, team effort, and partnerships. This paper briefly reviews the literature related to the…

A growing number of school districts around the country are using small school development as a central strategy for improving high schools and overhauling the way the district itself does business. Driven by an increasing sense of urgency and frustration with reforms that fail to fundamentally change the quality of instruction or the nature of…

No Child Left Behind is one of several factors motivating more and more high schools to work with their students to stay on track to graduating within four years. Unfortunately, research shows that neither by themselves works especially well: retention and social promotion are expensive failures. They are ineffective in improving student learning…