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This report addresses forces affecting Oregon's benchmark goals for education, recommendations about future measurement of the benchmark, research about best practices for improving these standards, and services and programs involved in addressing them. It describes the state of youth and education in Multnomah County through statistics on demographics, school funding and enrollment trends, and youth risk factors and outcomes. It uses data from surveys, focus groups, and academic research to examine which conditions are necessary for educational success, focusing on interpersonal relationships, expectations for students, student engagement, student contributions, and continuity of learning. After discussing strategies for measuring educational success and describing services and programs serving students in Multnomah County, the report offers eight strategies the community should use in order to meet the benchmarks (e.g.; marshalling resources within and outside the school to ensure that all children read at grade level by third grade and finding ways to ensure that expectations for all children are high). Four appendices include a table of youth services, youth focus group and interview protocols, adult stakeholder interview protocol, and Youth Asset Survey results. (Contains 105 references.) (SM)

This is an exploratory, descriptive study of experienced elementary, middle, and secondary school teachers who participated in a 9-month cooperative learning training project which was designed to encourage reflection upon their beliefs and assumptions about their pedagogy. Fifteen teachers were interviewed to understand how teachers modify cooperative learning to fit their existing beliefs about pedagogy; how teachers interact with this innovation to reconstruct their assumptions about teaching and learning; and how these reconstructions affect certain pedagogical themes which emerged from them. Themes which emerged were: conceptions of their role, their sense of authority and locus of control, their notions of the nature of knowing and knowledge, their conceptions of their decision-making, their understanding of cooperative learning, and their resolution of the dilemmas of practice which emerge for them in the process. Using a model which defined three broad epistemological orientations, or meaning systems, operating on a continuum from "transmission" to "transaction" to "transformation," which cast educational practices as systems of belief, the mainstream models of cooperative learning were analyzed for their fundamental assumptions regarding these themes. (Author/IAH)