Editors' Introduction
Sam Stringfield and John Hollifield

In this issue, the first thing you might notice is that something is missing -- our usual Communication Features. The reason is space. The publisher allows us a certain number of pages each year, and we keep exceeding that number with each issue because of all the good research studies and case studies that our reviewers tell us to publish about effective programs and practices for students placed at risk. (This is true although our acceptance rate is only 25%.) To ease the situation, beginning with this volume, we’ve been allotted an extra 12 pages per issue. Look for the communications features to resume in our next issue.

This issue’s case studies illustrate that we can learn from success, and we can learn from failure. No school has shown more evidence of success in improving the education of students placed at risk than Central Park East Secondary School. We asked Mary Ann Raywid, a major chronicler of the work of Central Park East since its beginning, to dip into the well one more time for an update and an analysis that seeks to put the success of CPESS in context, and relate that success to current recommendations that are being made for carrying out school reform and restructuring. What becomes clear is that CPESS has designed and uses effective structures and practices within a distinctively unique climate and cultural context that involves the extent to which the faculty own the school, faithfully and devotedly carrying out their common mission, the extent to which all school members and even outsiders are treated with common respect, the extent to which they live the idea of being a caring community, and the extent to which they teach and learn within an urban environment. Other elements contribute to success -- small size, choice of students and faculty to be there, thematic curriculum, formal and informal staff development, autonomy, outside contacts, stability. Raywid describes this multitude of features, and how and why they mesh.

From success to failure--and learning from it. Betty Merchant’s case study of a rural high school in the Midwest documents how the principal and faculty were unable to deal with increasing cultural diversity in their school, primarily because they were busy trying to maintain the status quo — the programs and practices that, up to that point, had made their school a fairly successful place. Merchant shows how the principal’s traditional role of preserving the status quo and contributing to organizational maintenance, carried out in a context of changing conditions, leads to teacher frustration, demoralization, and the rendering of whole groups of students placed at risk as effectively invisible. Many schools now facing a rapidly changing, increasingly diverse student population can benefit from this what-not-to-do and how-not-to-do-it account.

Lange and Lehr have conducted a study that examines the outcomes of Minnesota’s Second Chance Option, a program that allows students at risk of school failure to choose to attend alternative programs that are designed to meet their needs. The effects of school-choice programs and the effects of alternative school programs are difficult enough to measure individually, and performance outcomes in themselves are neither easy to identify nor to measure, but the authors derive findings in seven outcome areas, ranging from personal development to responsibility to attendance to student achievement. They examine outcomes for persisters — those who stick with their chosen alternative programs — and for the dropouts who are unable to complete their alternative programs. Somewhat surprising results emerge concerning the initial differences between persisters and dropouts -- eventual persisters are initially higher in behaviors that are associated with school success, but persisters and dropouts do not differ in some expected areas, such as scoring at average achievement levels in reading and math and engagement in high risk and illegal behaviors. Overall, persisters in the alternative programs show significant positive gains in reading but, unexpectedly, no gains in outcomes where progress was expected to more easily be shown, such as physical health, and contribution and citizenship.

We offer five book reviews this issue, seeking to catch up somewhat with the plethora of important works that keep coming out as students placed at risk becomes more and more recognized as a topic that demands national attention. As Janet Chrispeels notes in her review: "The need for books such as Gender Politics of Educational Change has never been greater"; we note that the same can be said about the need to recognize and critique the burgeoning number of good and not so good contributions to the literature now flowing from the publishers. Thus we offer Janet Chrispeels’ positive in-depth review of Gender Politics of Educational Change; James E. Newby’s review of Forty Years after the Brown Decision (Volume 13 and Volume 14), which he recommends to graduate students and active researchers but not necessarily to scholars already familiar with the literature; Peter Sola’s review of The Political Dynamics of American Education, which he recommends as a useful text for an introduction to politics in education; Phyllis McClure’s review of Stepping Over the Color Line, which she praises for its brutal frankness; and Allen Awaya’s review of Nothing’s Impossible: Leadership Lessons from Inside and Outside the Classroom, which he not-very-gently describes as being of not much use to educators.