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Utilizing a solution-focused approach, an alternative high school in Austin, Texas, has been able to impact multiple risk factors in the lives of youth identified as at risk of dropping out of school. Garza High School has become known as a solution-focused alternative school (SFAS) and has participated in various research investigations. The solution-focused approach has been developed into a model school program, recognized by the Texas Education Agency (TEA) as a model dropout prevention program and as providing high academic success for its students. This chapter discusses how Garza High School became and sustained its status as an SFAS. It also offers suggestions and implications for future research on building solution-focused school programs for at-risk students.

This chapter focuses on the Advanced Placement (AP) program in Texas. No place in America offers a larger or more vivid example of AP's recent history, its widening mission, and the challenges of carrying out that mission than Texas. The Lone Star State illustrates the complex interplay of traditional AP success in upscale schools; ambitious efforts to extend it to more disadvantaged youngsters; robust, AP-centric charter schools; and an exceptionally bumptious and varied array of dual-credit alternatives. As in most of the nation, AP participation has surged in Texas for four straight decades, and the upward slope has recently steepened. The number of exams per pupil rose, too, spurred by governmental and philanthropic moves to grow the program as well as intensifying college competition among high school students. The chapter then evaluates the National Math and Science Initiative (NMSI). The Fort Worth experience with NMSI—and the Texas experience more generally—illustrates the challenge of expanding AP to students who have not historically had much access to it or enjoyed great success with it.

This chapter examines the developments in Advanced Placement (AP) from the years following its first two decades up to the mid-1990s. By the late 1970s, a profound directional shift began with the gradual emergence of a second major AP mission: assisting able disadvantaged students to engage with and master college-level academic challenges during high school; boosting their confidence that they might in fact be “college material” even if family members and neighbors had never matriculated; and—as with their more privileged age-mates—holding out the possibility of exam scores that would elevate their admissions prospects and kick-start their progress toward degrees. As the participation of minority youngsters expanded faster than the program as a whole, particularly toward the end of the 1980s, the national AP population began to diversify. State legislators began to pass laws that encouraged AP participation and expanded access to it. These years also saw the College Board adding more subjects to the AP catalog. Some of the new classes were accessible to younger high school students without a lot of prerequisites, and some appeared less daunting than physics and calculus. Ultimately, during this period, “AP became a national program to a degree which even its most fervent supporters in the early years could not have imagined.”

This chapter argues that the greatest asset of the Advanced Placement (AP) program over nearly seven decades has been its capacity to set and maintain lofty academic standards for high school students and to sustain those standards during times when many forces push to relax them. That is an extraordinary accomplishment, considering all that has happened in American education during this period. Academic standards of various kinds have become a big deal, a growth industry, and an endless source of controversy, especially when accompanied—as they usually are—by student tests. Advanced Placement's nongovernmental character is rare in the world of education standards, at least since 1989. That was the year that state governors and President George H. W. Bush convened in Charlottesville, Virginia, and emerged from their “summit” with an ambitious set of national education goals for the year 2000. Congress created the National Council on Education Standards and Testing to “explore the desirability and feasibility of establishing national education standards and a method to assess their attainment” and a National Education Goals Panel to monitor and report on how the country was doing in pursuit of the summit targets. Many complications, modifications, and pushbacks followed. Ultimately, the entire quarter-century sequence left many hostile both to governmental micromanagement of schooling and, especially, to anything that smacked of government-prescribed standards, curricula, and tests. With just a few exceptions and caveats, the AP program has been immune to this suspicion, rancor, and resistance.

This chapter addresses how the Advanced Placement (AP) program became entangled with both partisans and critics of “liberal education.” Conflicts between devotees of liberal education on the one hand and disciplinary specialization on the other—often referred to as “culture wars”—extend far beyond academe, but they are especially intense among university faculty, particularly in the humanities and social sciences—and in the field of education itself. For AP to remain credible with both high schools and colleges, it must balance these contending forces. If an AP class strays too far into the esoteric, subjective, and sometimes doctrinaire realms of many college courses in these fields, it forfeits its ability to provide high school students with a broad and reasonably objective “universal grounding.” However, if it remains a simple survey course, particularly the kind that—in the case of history—concentrates on factual knowledge of things like elections, presidents, and wars, it will no longer convince professors in that field that doing well in it justifies college credit.

This chapter presents four themes that suggest some reasons why and how high school female students are — or are not — drawn into the field of computer science through their high school experiences. First, despite the national and local initiatives to “bring schools into the twenty-first century,” researchers discovered that few computer science learning opportunities actually exist at the high school level, especially in schools that serve communities of color. Second, they found that notions of relevance play a key role in influencing females' choices to enroll or not enroll in computer science classes. A limited and narrow presentation of what computer science is as well as what computer scientists actually do impacts students' take on how computer science could further their academic and career endeavors. Third, for the female students who do take computer science, researchers observed an accumulation of negative experiences in classroom settings, where greater male technology experience/expertise and female social isolation and insecurity are part of the cultural landscape. Fourth, all of these experiences are then compounded by the way that computer science is motivated and “interpreted” for the students.

Adolescent substance use has been a major concern in this country. According to the Monitoring the Future study conducted by the University of Michigan and supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, a high percentage of American youth has tried or currently use various illicit drugs, alcohol, and tobacco. Among the 8th, 10th, and 12th graders surveyed in 2003, for example, one third were using alcohol and one sixth smoked cigarettes. In addition, many adolescents use illegal drugs including marijuana, ecstasy, and LSD. Approximately 17% reported illicit drug use during the month prior to the survey and 37% reported that they had tried it at least once during their lifetime. This chapter discusses the substance use/abuse screening methods that school mental health professionals can easily utilize. It presents a summary table of screening tools developed particularly for the adolescent population. It discusses two screening instruments — Problem-Oriented Screening Instruments for Teenagers (POSIT) and Rutgers Alcohol Problem Index (RAPI) — which are considered most efficient at school settings. This information covers how to administer the instruments and how to interpret the results. Finally, a case example is provided to demonstrate the techniques described in the chapter.

This chapter examines how the stigma of AIDS results in negative attitudes and a lack of empathy toward persons with AIDS among high school students in Zambia. It describes attitudes toward HIV/AIDS and people living with HIV/AIDS among 204 male and female public high school students in Lusaka. The findings reveal that the pervasiveness of AIDS in Zambia has not resulted in a destigmatization of the epidemic and that many people distance themselves from HIV infection by seeing AIDS sufferers as the “other”, making strong moral judgments against those who are infected with the virus.

This chapter discusses a case involving the closure of a high school. School personnel, community leaders, and youth had formed the Student Leadership Council after a contentious spring culminated in the closing of the school. Researchers approached the group to ask if they could form a partnership to document their experiences as well as the experiences of their peers. The chapter discusses what ensued for young people whose interests were not represented adequately in a school closure decision. It chronicles what young people wanted from their school and why they objected to the decision to close it. It also offers an object lesson in why stronger opportunities for student voice and participation are needed in the struggle for educational equity.

This chapter examines the relationships between suicide ideations and behaviors and school victimization, bullying, and school climate. The chapter reviews the evidence on the prevalence of suicide among youth and its relationships with peer victimization and identifies gaps in knowledge. The chapter suggests that the social context and the climate of the school are moderating the relationships between bullying and suicide. Despite the importance of school experiences for adolescents, only a few studies have attempted to conceptualize and empirically investigate the relationships between school-level contextual characteristics and suicidal ideation. Based on the model of school violence and bullying in context, the chapter presents a study of suicide ideation among high school students in California. The study examined student-level, school-level, and cross-level interactions predicting suicide ideation. The chapter discusses the implications of the findings for a public health approach to the prevention of students suicide ideation.

This chapter offers a case study of sociopolitical development for two young people, Gabriela and Luis, who experienced marginalization linked to their class, ethnic, and linguistic backgrounds; this marginalization became most conspicuous in displays of anti-immigrant sentiment on Cinco de Mayo. It describes details a Critical Civic Inquiry project developed by students to raise awareness about racism and xenophobia at their school. It shows what practices of critique and collective agency looked like as they unfolded in the course project and how Gabriela and Luis made meaning of their experiences. Experiences like these should be more common for all young people, but particularly for those struggling with a social order that tracks and excludes them in ways that go unrecognized. Sociopolitical development, in this account, extends, but does not replace widely accepted practices of Social Emotional Learning (SEL) and positive youth development (PYD).

Following World War II, the age of first marriage dipped to an all-century low. Numbers of teen brides and grooms soared through the early 1960s, and then quickly dissipated. While early marriage fit right into a United States bent on fighting the Cold War with domestic stability at home, experts, journalists, and academics also bemoaned the large numbers of high school students who married in these decades. This chapter argues that the uptick in early marriage, especially among white urban and suburban dwellers, was caused by conflicting messages about sex, which resulted in premarital pregnancies and shotgun weddings; a nationwide emphasis on domesticity; and by cravings by teenagers for adulthood, symbolized through marriage. While rates of early marriage for rural and nonwhite residents remained steady, the real change here was a white middle-class early marriage surge, which is what resulted in all the expert hand-wringing.

This chapter explores: alcohol use among people under the legal drinking age in the United States; the consequences of their drinking; and proven prevention strategies. In the United States, it is illegal to sell alcohol to persons under age twenty-one. In 2010 nationwide 14% of eighth (usually thirteen-year-olds), 29% of tenth (usually fifteen-year-olds), and 41% of twelfth (usually seventeen-year-olds) graders drank alcohol, and 5% of eighth, 15% of tenth, and 27% of twelfth graders reported being drunk at least once per month. Older teens drink more. High school students who are frequent binge drinkers are more likely to engage in a variety of high-risk behaviours: driving after drinking, riding with drinking drivers, not wearing seat belts, carrying weapons, unplanned and unprotected sex, and illicit drug use. Human brain development continues into the third decade of life, raising concerns that heavy adolescent alcohol misuse may produce greater cognitive deficits relative to adults. Longitudinal research indicates heavy use of alcohol and other drugs during the teenage years predicts lower scores on tests of memory and attention.

In this chapter, a former intern at the Watts Labor Community Action Committee (WLCAC) shares her perceptions of Watts and her experience in a program designed to encourage high school students to pursue a college education. The WLCAC is a community-based, nonprofit public benefit organization that aims to improve the quality of life for the residents of Watts and South Central Los Angeles. She sees Rodia as an example of someone who opposed “social paradigms that governed societies, stereo typed people, and allowed in equality to exist.” His life and his work expressed a vision “that spoke silently against preconceived notions about America.” In Watts she sees a community “that fights every day for equality with regard to food, housing, education, health, and employment”.

This chapter offers scholars a nonethnographic way to explore children's religious worlds with an in-depth analysis of the author's experiences developing surveys with Bosnian Muslim high school students. This case study made use of a two-stage process involving the use of a small-sample pilot survey (120 respondents, with open-ended questions) before conducting a large-sample survey. Such a process of surveying is nothing unusual as regards survey methods. What is important here is that because it provided direct access to the prevailing words, idioms, themes, ideas, and expressions of the youths being surveyed, it proved invaluable when coding responses into forced-choice options for the large-sample survey. Inadvertently, this two-stage process had come to engage the students as “consultants” in the project.