Editors' Introduction
Sam Stringfield and John Hollifield

The contents of this issue very accurately reflect the purposes that we intended when founding the Journal of Education for Students Placed At Risk. The policy, case study, and research articles in this issue build on the theme of improving schooling for traditionally disadvantaged young people. The five book reviews provide similar reflections on efforts to improve schools for students from linguistically diverse backgrounds and from high poverty inner cities.

Both Mary Jean LeTendre and Judith McDonald write about the need to move from "what was" to "what must be" in order for us to provide better schooling for all Americans. Shelley Billig, Suzanne Perry, and Nancy Pokorny extend those propositions by specifically discussing state capacity for school support teams. Clearly, leaders in the policy realm are prepared to support dynamic, thoughtful school change.

The David Squires and Robert Kranyik case study of two ATLAS schools, "Connecting School-Based Management and Instructional Improvement: A Case Study of Two ATLAS Schools," provides a fascinating look into the day-to-day working of one of the New American Schools designs. The advantages and limitations of one type of external partnership are thoughtfully explored by the authors.

Robert Cooper’s article, "Urban School Reform: Student Response to Detracking In a Racially Mixed High School," provides a stimulating contrasting case of urban school reform. Cooper examines a high school’s efforts to detrack its offerings and thereby achieve the obviously desirable goal of full racial and ethnic integration.

In "What Makes the Difference in School Improvement? An Impact Study of Onward to Excellence in Mississippi Schools," James Kushman and Kim Yap explore variables associated with implementation of a second, well known school reform design: Onward to Excellence. In a juxtaposition similar to that seen in the case studies, Dianne Taylor and Charles Teddlie examine implementation fidelity in non-program-specific Title I schoolwide programs. As with the case studies, the advantages and limitations of some types of whole-school reforms can be readily observed in these two research papers. In particular, each of this issue’s case studies and research articles note the challenges, often unanticipated, in schools’ efforts to bring reform uniformly into classrooms.

In "Mathematics Attribution Differences By Ethnicity and Socio-Economic Status," Edward Mooney and Carol Thornton revisit and advance research in the area of attribution theory. It is reassuring to note that, in general, students from diverse ethnic and economic backgrounds have learned one of what Faulkner called "the old verities": that over the long haul, hard work tends to pay off.

This issue’s book reviews examine school improvement from perspectives ranging from families to state departments of education, from the challenges of providing multi-lingual education to providing the highest quality schooling in inner-city environments. While each volume, and each reviewer, is unflinchingly aware of the challenges before us, each retains optimism that meaningful reform of schools serving large numbers of students placed at risk can happen in our lifetimes. That, of course, is the most important theme of the Journal of Education for Students Placed At Risk.