Editors' Introduction
Sam Stringfield and John Hollifield

This issue completes the second year of publication for JESPAR. This becomes a time to give thanks. We would like to thank Mary Jean LeTendre, Janet Carroll, Mitzi Beach, and Virginia Plunkett for their regular columns. Thanks to all the persons who have submitted manuscripts for review. Thanks also to our reviewers (listed in an appendix to this issue). To the members of our editorial board, for serving so often as reviewers, for your contributions, and most importantly, for your gentle guidance, thank you all. The editorial team would like to thank Lawrence Erlbaum and his talented staff for believing in this journal from day one, and for continuing to provide technical and marketing support. Finally, thank you, our subscribers, for making JESPAR worth the effort.

As almost every article in our first eight issues has noted, those of us working to provide the highest quality education to all students have a long way to go. Yet JESPAR’s volumes one and two serve as mile posts along the road, indicating that progress is being made. We all have a great deal for which to be thankful.

As we pulled together this issue, we were struck by what seemed to be a common undertone reverberating through every piece — a kind of "yes, but" pattern.

Yes, improving academic achievement is the crux of Title I. But let’s not write off the value of the arts not only in their own right but in their contribution to improving academic achievement, says Mary Jean Le Tendre.

Yes, we all agree on the importance of involving parents in their children’s education, says Virginia Plunkett. But let’s get beyond our mutual agreement and get into actions that make school and family partnership a component of all schools.

Yes, the new Title I is a bold approach to integrating multiple educational reform efforts and enabling all children to meet high standards, Shelly Billig affirms. But let’s examine what changes are actually occurring in schools and what progress has been made since the legislation was enacted. This article is a research study based on survey data, but we chose to designate it as a "communications" piece because its strength is in communicating to all of us what is currently happening out in our Title I schools.

Yes, some educators harbor reservations about the idea that an urban neighborhood public school may actually be able to pull together around shared goals and values to develop a caring community -- magnet schools, private schools, charter schools, and schools of choice (given more homogeneous populations) are more likely to accomplish this. But Cindy Kratzer gives us her case study of Roscoe Elementary School -- big (1170 students), poor (over 95 percent free or reduced price lunch), primarily Hispanic (92.6 percent), where a strong caring community and a push toward academic excellence complement each other and contribute to the success of all students.

Barbara Signer, T. Mark Beasley, and Elizabeth Bauer continue the "yes, but" undertone in their research on the mathematics self-concepts of high school students. Yes, they find that males are more likely than females to enroll in additional mathematics courses and are more likely to view intrinsic constructs (ability and effort) as the reasons for their grades in mathematics. But, they find evidence that contradicts the notion that African American youth have little self-confidence, and evidence that minority youth are not easily discouraged by low achievement.

Even this issue’s book reviewers found themselves in a "yes, but" world. In Phyllis McClure’s review of National Issues in Education: Elementary and Secondary Education Act, she says yes to the book’s descriptions of how ESEA went through many political contortions and battles to emerge as good legislation, but wishes the author had provided more of his own insider’s nitty-gritty observations. Mary Nix, reviewing Multicultural Perspectives, Transformative Knowledge, and Action: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, says yes to the book’s coverage of the idea of "double natures," as various chapters describe historical figures trying to balance being reformer and conformer, activist and scholar, ethnic and mainstream. But Nix wishes that the book leaned more toward brevity and clarity. Finally, reviewing Who Chooses? Who Loses? Culture, Institutions, and the Unequal Effects of School Choice, Charles Glenn says yes, there are some useful parts here that illuminate the experiences of magnet schools and public and private schools in other nations. But Glenn disagrees forcefully with the book’s overall conclusions about the unequal effects of school choice and makes his own case for continuing to advocate for public school choice that is well designed and well implemented and thus makes a positive difference for poor children.