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\"Despite measured success of American public schools, the media, politicians, and big business attack public schools and their teachers with inaccuracies that threaten the equal opportunities provided by public education. Research indicates that No Child Left Behind, charter schools, and vouchers do not improve students learning or help educators teach better. The book provide reasons to support American public schools and educators\"-- Provided by publisher.

Gaining students' cooperation in urban classrooms involves establishing an environment where teachers address students' cultural and ethnic needs, as well as their social, emotional, and cognitive needs. This article describes the management strategies of 13 1st- through 12th-grade urban teachers from seven cities throughout the United States. These educators' practices are compared to the literature on culturally responsive teaching. All 13 teachers use several culturally responsive strategies-including demonstrating care for students, acting with authority and assertiveness, and using congruent communication patterns to establish a productive learning environment for their diverse students.

If teachers and parents genuinely believe that it is educators' responsibility to prepare students for a life of \"meeting employers' needs,\" then teachers have to better examine what it is that they choose to teach students. That is, what should be in the curriculum to ensure that students have the knowledge to prepare them for a life of employment? Educators, parents, and employers all seem to agree on the types of skills they believe students should be developing. They have what the author considers to be a reasonable sense of what students should learn to prepare them for productive and successful lives. But the author finds that the traditional curriculum, divided up into separate subjects, neither engages students nor prepares them for productive lives. He believes that the answer to both problems is to have students design their own curricula. Students who design their own curricula report that they have improved their skills and strategies in thinking critically and creatively, solving problems, working collaboratively with others, communicating well, writing more effectively, reading more analytically, and conducting research to solve problems. No traditional curriculum, delivered as separate subjects, can provide students with the deep, diverse, and meaningful learning experiences that their own curriculum choices can lead to. (Contains 29 endnotes.)

One of the most challenging daily experiences of teaching young adolescents is helping them transition from Piaget's concrete to the formal operational stage of cognitive development during the middle school years. Students who have reached formal operations can design and test hypotheses, engage in deductive reasoning, use flexible thinking, imagine intangibles, understand proportionality, generate alternative strategies, plan for the future, and reflect on their thinking processes. As much as middle level teachers want their students to engage in advanced cognitive processing, several studies reveal that, at most, one-third of eighth graders reach Piaget's last stage of cognitive development--formal operational thought. Much of middle school curricula requires students to engage in formal operational cognitive processes, even though most students seldom reach the levels of understanding that teachers might expect in each subject area. Middle school teachers must understand how they can specifically help young adolescents move into formal operations. That understanding begins with the realization that the type of curricula delivered to young adolescents affects their opportunities to improve their cognitive processing. The National Middle School Association (NMSA) for more than 20 years has advocated for \"curriculum that is relevant, challenging, integrative, and exploratory.\" Several middle school teachers at Radnor Middle School in southeastern Pennsylvania have found a way to meet the state curricular standards while simultaneously engaging young adolescents in student-oriented curricula that encourage growth toward formal operational thought and processing. This article describes three alternative curricular programs existing at Radnor: \"Crossroads\" for sixth graders, \"Watershed\" for seventh graders, and \"Soundings\" for eighth graders. All three curricular programs are designed to meet the NMSA guidelines for meaningful curricular experiences. (Contains 3 figures and 1 note.)

Effective communication is the basis of developing an environment of mutual respect between students and teachers. The more congruent the communication is between students and teachers, the more likely students are to become willing participants in the learning process, and the more likely it is that the teacher can maintain a comfortable classroom management environment. More specifically, middle level teachers can communicate congruently with young adolescents by: (a) Using active listening techniques; (b) Demonstrating body language and facial expressions that match verbal messages; (c) Avoiding traditional communication roadblocks; (d) Responding with empathy to students' anxiety and frustration; and (e) Using culturally responsive communication processes. In this article, the author discusses the significance of congruent communication in effective classroom management.

Examines how caring relationships between urban middle school students and their advisors at a Philadelphia middle school facilitate personal goal setting and community service as well as help them face issues related to sexuality, drugs and alcohol, personal safety, and conflict resolution. Notes comments from teachers emphasizing students' need for advisory programs that promote development of personal trusting relationships. (KB)

Discusses the use of children's literature by Dr. Seuss in the middle school classroom to help students explore issues of their character and social development, adult expectations, and changes in their personal environment. Discusses themes addressed in selected Dr. Seuss books, and how these can be used as thematic units for classroom activities. (JPB)

Background. Pollinators, which provide the agriculturally and ecologically essential service of pollination, are under threat at a global scale. Habitat loss and homogenisation, pesticides, parasites and pathogens, invasive species, and climate change have been identified as past and current threats to pollinators. Actions to mitigate these threats, e.g., agri-environment schemes and pesticide-use moratoriums, exist, but have largely been applied post-hoc. However, future sustainability of pollinators and the service they provide requires anticipation of potential threats and opportunities before they occur, enabling timely implementation of policy and practice to prevent, rather than mitigate, further pollinator declines. Methods. Using a horizon scanning approach we identified issues that are likely to impact pollinators, either positively or negatively, over the coming three decades. Results. Our analysis highlights six high priority, and nine secondary issues. High priorities are: (1) corporate control of global agriculture, (2) novel systemic pesticides, (3) novel RNA viruses, (4) the development of new managed pollinators, (5) more frequent heatwaves and drought under climate change, and (6) the potential positive impact of reduced chemical use on pollinators in non-agricultural settings. Discussion. While current pollinator management approaches are largely driven by mitigating past impacts, we present opportunities for pre-emptive practice, legislation, and policy to sustainably manage pollinators for future generations.

Severe hemophilia A is managed with factor VIII replacement or hemostatic products that stop or prevent bleeding. Data on gene therapy with hematopoietic stem-cell (HSC)-based expression of factor VIII for the treatment of severe hemophilia A are lacking. We conducted a single-center study involving five participants 22 to 41 years of age with severe hemophilia A without factor VIII inhibitors. Autologous HSCs were transduced with CD68-ET3-LV - a lentiviral vector including a new transgene ( ) with a myeloid-directed CD68 promoter - either without transduction enhancer (group 1) or with transduction enhancer (group 2). Transduced HSCs were transplanted into recipients after myeloablative conditioning. The treatment was assessed for safety (engraftment and regimen-related toxic effects) and efficacy (factor VIII activity and annualized bleeding rate). Participants received CD68-ET3-LV-transduced autologous CD34+ HSCs at doses of 5.0×10 to 6.1×10 per kilogram of body weight. The vector copy numbers in the final drug product were 1.0 and 0.6 copies per cell for the two participants in group 1 and 1.5, 0.6, and 2.2 copies per cell for the three participants in group 2. The duration of severe neutropenia was 7 to 11 days and of severe thrombocytopenia was 1 to 7 days. The median factor VIII activity level, measured with the use of a one-stage assay, after day 28 until the last follow-up visit was 5.2 IU per deciliter (range, 3.0 to 8.7) and 1.7 IU per deciliter (range, 1.0 to 4.0) with a peripheral-blood vector copy number of 0.2 and 0.1 copies per cell, respectively, in the two group 1 participants, and 37.1 IU per deciliter (range, 18.3 to 73.6), 19.3 IU per deciliter (range, 6.6 to 34.5), and 39.9 IU per deciliter (range, 20.6 to 55.1) with a peripheral-blood vector copy number of 4.4, 3.2, and 4.8 copies per cell, respectively, in the three group 2 participants. The annualized bleeding rate was zero for all five participants over a cumulative follow-up of 81 months (median follow-up, 14 months; range, 9 to 27). Gene therapy for hemophilia A with the use of lentiviral vector-transduced autologous HSCs resulted in stable factor VIII expression, with factor VIII activity correlating to vector copy number in the peripheral blood. (Funded by the Ministry of Science and Technology, Government of India, and others; ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT05265767; Clinical Trials Registry-India number, CTRI/2022/03/041304.).