Book review

The following book is reviewed.Disability, politics and the struggle for change Len barton 'Ed.', 2001 London: David Fulton Publishers 184 pp., ISBN 1 85346 809 6 £21.00     

Ethics at home: informed consent in your own backyard

Keying off of a “fully informed consent letter” that consists of the text of her original letter to participants interspersed with insights gained after‐the‐fact, the author explores ethical and institutional power issues that arose as she conducted a qualitative research study in her home institution – her own “backyard” – and offers a critical examination of the concept of “informed consent,” calling for a radical revision of the standard notions of research ethics that blur ethical sensibilities.     

Two- and Three-Year Achievement Results From the Memphis Restructuring Initiative

The purpose of this study was to analyze student achievement data from the first 3 years of the Memphis Restructuring Initiative (MRI). The MRI represents one of the first efforts by an urban school district to move past traditional top-down versus bottom-up reform debates by providing systemic support for outside-in/inside-out implementation and local co-construction of externally-developed reform designs in schools. Analyses of academic achievement focus on a state-of-the-art measure of value added assessments. At the end of 3 years the reforming schools had produced generally positive gains relative to locally matched control schools. Those results varied somewhat by reform type and by level of poverty in the communities being served. Based on the research methods used and the results, implications for future research and practice in educational reform are discussed.     

Museums and the gifted

The integrative curriculum combines subject‐matter studies, mini‐courses, and long term projects which allows for individual differences and provides a qualitatively different instruction program for the gifted.