NCCRESt

part of the Education Reform Networks

Early Intervention in General Education

• Critical Perspectives on Project Head Start: Revisioning the Hope and Challenge. SUNY Series, Youth Social Services, Schooling, and Public Policy
  This book offers critical perspective on the complex dynamics of politics, class, gender, power, race, and ethnicity in Project Head Start. Moving beyond the literature on Head Start's effects on children's achievement, the volume considers how the program has operated with families, in communities, and with other institutions.
• Fishes, Ferdinand, and Flannelgraph Fun: Using Literature as an Intervention
  School psychologists are seeking ways to expand their role in regular education, and to find new intervention techniques for working with at-risk and exceptional students. Literature may be used to introduce specific topics for discussion, to increase interest in reading for at-risk students, to build readiness skills, to reinforce classroom learning, or as a demonstration of techniques for the teacher.
• Using All the Crayons. Educator Patricia Ramsey Says the Lessons of Tolerance Begin in Early Childhood
  Interviews a professor of psychology and education who discusses the implicit messages about differences and power relationships that children receive from the adults around them. Teachers should assess their own biases and work to ensure that multicultural education is more than superficial window dressing.
• Tracking/Monitoring Program To Enhance Multicultural Student Retention
  The StudentPal program is a student tracking system developed jointly by the Multicultural Affairs program and High Technology Center at Glendale Community College, in Arizona. The program uses computer-assisted tracking to target students and various student characteristics and identify at-risk factors to improve the retention and success of multicultural/minority students.
• "Critical Perspectives on Project Head Start: Revisioning the Hope and Challenge," edited by Jeanne Ellsworth and Lynda Ames. Book Review
  Describes Ellsworth and Ames' edited book as an eclectic collection including historical, ethnographic, autobiographical, empirical, and self-reflective texts. Maintains that although the book is an important contribution to the literature by placing current practices into historical and social context, thereby leading to a more critical view of the revered program, the work omits an economic view.
• RTI Adoption Survey
  In February-March of 2008, The Council of Administrators of Special Education (CASE) and Spectrum K12 School Solutions conducted a web survey of K12 school administrators to assess the level of adoption of Response to Intervention (RTI). The objective of the survey was to provide a benchmark for districts to evaluate their rate of RTI adoption relative to other districts.
• Responsiveness to Intervention Teaching Before Testing Helps Avoid Labeling
  Prereferral intervention is a modification of instruction before referral to accommodate underachieving students and reduce the number of inappropriate special education placements. This article reports on evaluation of a Tier 3 responsiveness to intervention (RTI) program in an urban school district with 96% minority (mostly Hispanic) students.
• Minority Overrepresentation in Special Ed. Targeted
  This article reports that a new provision of federal law taking effect this school year allows, and in some cases requires, school districts to focus some of their federal special education money on reducing the enrollment of minority students in such programs. The provision, contained in the 2004 reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, requires some districts to spend as much as 15 percent of that federal aid on what are called "early intervening" services, which are meant to bolster the achievement of students before they are officially referred for special education.
• Family-School Partnership Increases School Readiness
  Highlights components of an early intervention program for preschool children and families that operates in the multicultural community of Miami (Dade County) Florida. (GCP).
• IDEA Reauthorization Signed Into Law
  The article focuses on the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act which has been reauthorized with significant changes that will affect the way school-based practitioners serve students. U.S.
• Early Childhood Special Education for Children with Disabilities, Ages Three through Five: An Introduction. Revised
  This introduction to a reference guide for early childhood special education personnel in North Dakota discusses the purpose of the guidelines, the North Dakota philosophy on the importance of early intervention programs, and quality indicators of early intervention programs.