In California, the public scrutiny of education has placed tremendous demands on districts, schools, administrators, teachers, parents, and students. With increasing pressure and decreasing funds, ...schools are required to reach all students. Existing research shows that involving parents in a child's education increases student achievement regardless of Socioeconomic Status (SES), ethnicity, or parent education level. With this in mind, it is important to study schools that have involved parents successfully. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to describe the components, the stakeholders' perceptions, and possible links to literacy development and the parent participation program located in an upper-middle class neighborhood. The participants included two principals, six teachers, and six teaching parents. This study will benefit similar schools that are looking to effectively involve parents. A thick description of findings provides insight into the school program. It found features that provided success were a shared vision of involving families, which in turn created a sense of community. Teaching a balanced curriculum and working together---collaborating, with a lot of communication was essential to the success of the school. The stakeholders saw their program and themselves as committed with high expectations of one another, which helped build trust. The strengths of the program that helped build literacy had to do with a focus on broad student outcomes, differentiated instruction, and self-evaluation. This is not intended as a prescription, but merely a description of a successful program. Educators need to take from this program and implement portions that will best suit their population of students and their families.
The European Union (EU) has become the subject of intense academic interest in recent years. This has been because it has grown greatly in importance since the mid-1980s. There have been three main ...dimensions to this growing importance. First, and most obviously, the EU has extended its membership: from ten member states in 1985 to 27 in 2009. Having hitherto been strictly a West European organization, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 paved the way for the EU coming to cover most of the European continent west of Russia. It is, moreover, a covering that is not yet complete, with a long list of potential further members, many of which will involve very difficult decisions for the EU. Second, the EU has greatly extended its policy reach. Across most spheres of public policy it now has some sort of direct involvement, and in a significant number of crucially important policy areas — including market regulation, agriculture, fishing, and monetary policy for eurozone members — the nature of that involvement is extensive. Perhaps the most novel and challenging extension of competences has been in the area of Justice and Home Affairs (JHA), which traditionally has been seen as being at the heart of state sovereignty but now is an arena of very extensive EU activity. Third, in a series of treaty reform rounds starting with 1986 Single European Act (SEA), the EU has strengthened its policy-making capacity, with many of its key decisions now being taken on a largely supranational basis.
Bulletins issued on the health of European integration and EU studies have often taken a pessimistic view. For example, Karl Deutsch in the 1960s argued that the integration process had reached a ...plateau (Deutsch et al., 1967), Ernst Haas in the 1970s wrote of the ‘obsolescence’ of European integration (Haas, 1975) and John Mearsheimer at the beginning of the 1990s — approaching the subject from a realist perspective — saw integration as a contingent phenomenon that would fade away with the end of the Cold War (Mearsheimer, 1990). All of these intimations of mortality have proved decidedly premature. Since the mid-1980s in particular European integration has advanced rapidly, with the EU deepening and widening at pace, and with a long queue of would-be entrants at its door — despite steeply declining chances of accession.
