May 16, 2001  Every year, Clement R. Markley does a little mathematics exercise with his history classes here at Simon Rivera High School.

May 16, 2001  Among national high school improvement efforts, the High Schools That Work program is a pioneer. Begun in 1987 by the Atlanta-based Southern Regional Education Board, the network now includes 1,100 schools in 26 states.

May 9, 2001  In hotel conference rooms here last month, a group of university faculty members met to pore over samples of freshman work, trying to identify the knowledge and skills students need to succeed in the first year of college.

May 9, 2001  Alan H. Rowe had been opening doors to the nation's historically black colleges and universities for Sacramento-area young people for more than a decade when the Elk Grove school district "discovered" him. It was a matter of luck, but also a matter of timing.

May 2, 2001  With its football games, average test scores, and angst-filled social world, Glen Este High School might well symbolize America's suburban high school, remarkable chiefly for how typical it is.

May 2, 2001  Driving her bleary-eyed daughter to school at 7:20 a.m. one day this spring, Lanning Taliaferro was bemoaning a threat of violence that had closed a nearby school. Her daughter Anne Lange, a junior at Ossining High School in Ossining, N.Y., had a different take on the incident: "I wish someone would do that here so I could get some sleep."

April 25, 2001  Expressing the belief that "America's young people are a lot smarter than we give them credit for," then-U.S. Secretary of Education Richard W. Riley issued a challenge to the nation's high schools in February of last year.

April 25, 2001  When the alarm clock blares its unwelcome wake-up call at 6 a.m. in Noah Hogan's bedroom, the 17-year-old has to fight off the temptation to sleep in and skip class. Like many seniors, he has already been accepted by a college, and these last months of high school can be a tedious countdown to graduation.

April 25, 2001  If senior year is for slacking off, counting down until Beach Week, and reveling in the long-awaited privileges that come with reigning atop the high school food chain, somebody forgot to tell Gabe Mandujano.

April 18, 2001  Anna Rios dislikes the idea that she has to pass a statewide test to earn a high school diploma. Still, the slight 15-year-old, in jeans and a baseball cap, is staying after school to bone up on the algebra on the Massachusetts Assessment of Comprehensive Skills, which this year's sophomores must pass by 2003 to graduate. "I know I need help," she explained, "so I decided to come for the after-school program."

April 18, 2001  After nearly three decades as a chemistry teacher, Jeffrey Rogers felt he had mastered his subject and knew best how to teach it. So when a colleague in the language arts department at Hialeah-Miami Lakes High School suggested that he incorporate reading strategies into his lessons to help students tackle the complex text and vocabulary of his course, Mr. Rogers responded bluntly, "I'm not a reading teacher."

April 18, 2001  Over the next few years, math enrollment at Roseville Area High School promises to look like the Dow Jones Industrial average in the 1990s: It'll keep going up.

April 11, 2001  The students scheduled to give persuasive speeches in Erva Curtiss' 9th grade English class were acting as if they'd rather be at the dentist than speak in front of their peers.

April 11, 2001  When Rachael Oberdalhoff thinks of her high school years, she remembers crowded hallways, inaccessible guidance counselors, "gut" courses on floral design and marriage, and the social life. Especially the social life.

April 11, 2001  In Philadelphia, what started 10 years ago with a few students in a manufacturing apprenticeship has today grown to a districtwide school-to-work program in which hundreds of employers work with thousands of students and teachers to provide work-based learning experiences.