Editors' Introduction
Sam Stringfield and John Hollifield

This issue marks JESPAR's first full year of publication. We think we are progressing in our mission--to provide the best research-based information to educators involved with improving the education of students placed at risk, and to promote the use of that information through effective communications among researchers, policy makers, and practitioners. As always, we invite your comments and contributions. We want to hear from you about what JESPAR is doing well and what you think it could do better.

The concerns involved in educating students placed at risk are multiple and wide-ranging. In this issue, our authors address concerns from preschool to high school, from family involvement to staff development, from building a communal school organization to addressing the specific needs of homeless children, from the design of national education reform to the examination of best practices in individual schools.

In our communication section, Mary Jean LeTendre continues to spell out the potential (and the requirements) of the new Title I with her comments on the need for initiating sustained professional development that will have a positive and lasting impact on teacher performance and student achievement. Mitzi Beach, in her first message as the newly elected president of the National Association of State Coordinators of Compensatory Education, issues a direct challenge: our efforts to provide high-quality education for all must include those at perhaps the most risk of all, our homeless children.

Gary Wehlage and Calvin Stone give us case studies of a middle school and a high school that are integrating social services to serve youth at risk. They examine how the communal organization of their middle school, compared to the bureaucratic organization of their high school, affects the integration and delivery of those services. Sharon Inger describes the creation and implementation of an alternative high school program designed to help students at risk of dropping out get their high school degree.

Early language and literacy development is vital to success in early reading instruction, which lays the groundwork for future achievement. Nancy Karweit and Barbara A. Wasik examine research on the specific practice of storybook reading with at-risk preschoolers in school settings. Is this, according to the research findings, an effective strategy? If so, what procedures make the strategy most effective? Brent McBride and Hui-Fen Lin, meanwhile, examine the attitudes and perceptions of parents, teachers, and family support staff toward parental involvement in prekindergarten programs, seeking research-based avenues for promoting an active role for parents in their young children's education.

Our book reviews also reflect the wide-ranging scope of this issue. Seymour Sarasan reviews Redesigning Education (Wilson and Daviss), and finds hope that school reform, paying more attention to system design, may yet be able to improve America's schools. Rosella Bardley, examining two volumes of Best Ideas from America's Blue Ribbon Schools (National Association of Elementary School Principals), offers suggestions for making the "good ideas" contained in these volumes more useable by all schools.