Beyond Prevention Curricula: A Guide to Developing Alternative Activities Programs

This guide is designed to help educators and youth workers better understand how programs of alternative activities can effectively be used to supplement school-based efforts to prevent alcohol and other drug use among youth, and to encourage schools to become more involved in program development and implementation. It seeks to clear up some of the confusion over what constitutes a program of alternative activities and what its goals should be, to improve understanding of the potential value of this approach, and to recommend promising strategies for improving the effectiveness of these activities in preventing and reducing use of alcohol and other drugs among youth. The guide explains the rationale for such programs and outlines the characteristics of good activities. It then describes strategies for program implementation and highlights at the end of the report, a number of promising programs that have put tl1e ideas into action. Most of these programs are comprehensive, collaborative efforts to offer high-risk youth a variety of supervised, constructive activities on a regular basis. These programs promote positive youth development and the avoidance of alcohol and other drug use and parent and community involvement in prevention efforts

Disability Employment 101

[Excerpt] Employers face workforce challenges daily, and the forecast of labor market shortages is not getting any brighter. The 2005 survey report, Cost and Effectiveness of Accommodations in the Workplace: Preliminary Results of a Nationwide Study, conducted by the Job Accommodation Network (JAN), a service of the Office of Disability Employment Policy (ODEP) of the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), reveals that workforce development and retention of workers at all skill levels are two of the major issues facing small and large businesses today. Moreover, a 2003 Aspen Institute report projects a critical shortage of workers over the next 20 years, particularly in jobs requiring higher education and training. The report confirms what businesses already know—there are too few qualified workers to meet projected needs

Educational Excellence for All Children Act of 1999

The President announced that he would shortly send to the Congress the Educational Excellence for All Children Act of 1999, his proposal to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA). This legislation reaffirms the critical role of the Federal Government in working with schools, school districts, and States to promote educational excellence for all children. Every child, parent, grandparent, and taxpayer deserves high quality public schools in their communities. More specifically, the proposal would build on the 1994 ESEA reauthorization, which established the core principle that disadvantaged children should achieve to the same challenging academic standards as their more fortunate peers, by helping States, districts, schools, and teachers use these standards to guide classroom instruction and assessment for all students

Presidential address: How to improve poverty measurement in the United States

This paper discusses the reasons why the current official U.S. poverty measure is outdated and nonresponsive to many anti-poverty initiatives. A variety of efforts to update and improve the statistic have failed, for political, technical, and institutional reasons. Meanwhile, the European Union is taking a very different approach to poverty measurement. The paper ends with four recommended steps that would allow the U.S. to improve its measurement of poverty and economic need.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/58071/1/20323_ftp.pd

Status of the Resource Room Model in Local Education Agencies: A Descriptive Study

Although resource room programs are widely used, only limited information is available on implementation of this model. The purpose of the present investigation was to survey a nationwide sample of local education agencies (LEAs) to determine the status of this model at the local level and to identify the characteristics of resource programs as they are currently implemented. A questionnaire was sent to a 5% stratified random sample of LEAs with a 53.4% response rate. Results indicated that most local education agencies use resource room programs, and have done so for at least three years. Most programs are multicategorical. The majority of respondents indicated that they believed the programs were effective, and that they would continue to be used. A major conclusion from this study relates to the need for descriptions of model resource room programs and practices.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

The impact of no Child Left Behind on student achievement

The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act compelled states to design school accountability systems based on annual student assessments. The effect of this federal legislation on the distribution of student achievement is a highly controversial but centrally important question. This study presents evidence on whether NCLB has influenced student achievement based on an analysis of state‐level panel data on student test scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The impact of NCLB is identified using a comparative interrupted time series analysis that relies on comparisons of the test‐score changes across states that already had school accountability policies in place prior to NCLB and those that did not. Our results indicate that NCLB generated statistically significant increases in the average math performance of fourth graders (effect size 5 0.23 by 2007) as well as improvements at the lower and top percentiles. There is also evidence of improvements in eighth‐grade math achievement, particularly among traditionally low‐achieving groups and at the lower percentiles. However, we find no evidence that NCLB increased fourth‐grade reading achievement. © 2011 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/86808/1/20586_ftp.pd