Up until 2020, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading scores had increased only slightly since the early 1990s with large achievement gaps for students of color and students living in poverty. Modest gains in fourth grade reading proficiency since 1992 were erased during the pandemic. The insufficient progress in reading even…

The 10th anniversary of Common Core's launch offers the opportunity to take stock of the impact these nearly national standards have had on student learning, as well as their future prospects. In this article, Morgan Polikoff shares his view that the standards movement in general, and Common Core in particular, have achieved all they are going to…

The Common Core State Standards, released in 2010, were rapidly adopted by more than 40 states. Champions maintained that these rigorous standards would transform American education, but the initiative went on to encounter a bumpy path. A decade on, what are we to make of this ambitious effort? What kind of impact, if any, has it had on the…

Research and history has demonstrated the overwhelming disparity and gap of mathematical achievement between African Americans and their White counterparts. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the achievement gap on a national level is prevalent. The USA jurisdiction has Black 8th grade math students results at 12%…

Video games have become a popular medium in our society, and recent scholarship suggests that games can support substantial learning. This study stems from a project in which we created a video game enabling students to use biotechnology to solve a societal problem. As students engaged in the game, they necessarily interacted with the underlying…

We use three data sources to build a rationale for why intensive interventions are necessary for students with pervasive reading disabilities: current data on the performance of students with disabilities on reading achievement measures over time, observation studies on students with reading disabilities in general and special education…

The Sacramento City Unified School District (SCUSD), asked the Council of the Great City Schools to review the district's services for students with disabilities and provide recommendations to improve performance and narrow the achievement gap between these students and their nondisabled peers. This report was designed to help SCUSD achieve its…

The Focused Practice Instructional Approach (FPIA) was based on the Environmental Mode of instruction established by George Hillocks' 1986 meta-analysis for writing instruction. The purpose of this study was to clearly define the FPIA approach using the original studies and test if it was significantly effective in fourth grade classrooms using…

The National Writing Project (NWP) is the nation's premier professional development network dedicated to improving the teaching of writing. The NWP network comprises nearly 200 local sites in all 50 states, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. This report presents the results of a seven-year survey study of teachers participating in NWP summer…