The District of Columbia (DC) Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP) is the only federally funded program that provides vouchers to low-income families to send their children to private schools. Congress created the OSP in 2004 and reauthorized it in 2011 under the Scholarships for Opportunity and Results (SOAR) Act. As part of the 2011 SOAR Act,…

City Year is a learning organization committed to the rigorous evaluation of its "Whole School Whole Child" model, which trains and deploys teams of AmeriCorps members to low-performing, urban schools to empower more students to reach their full potential. A third-party study by Policy Studies Associates (PSA) examined the impact of…

New Leaders created the Effective Practice Incentive Community (EPIC) initiative in 2006 to learn from educators driving achievement gains in high-need urban schools. EPIC identifies school leaders and teachers whose students are making significant achievement gains and financially rewards these educators in exchange for sharing and documenting…

J.C. Nalle is a Community School located in the Marshall Heights neighborhood of Ward 7 in Washington, D.C. The community in which J.C. Nalle is located, historically one of the more economically disadvantaged areas of the city, has experienced a number of changes in recent years. This report of evaluation findings begins with an introduction to…

Teaching entrepreneurship--how to create, grow and run a business or organization--is one potential means to increase college and career readiness skills. Learning how to start a business can improve critical thinking, communication and collaboration (Gallagher, Stepien, & Rosenthal, 1992; Hmelo, 1998), which are key qualities for academic as…

The District of Columbia Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP) is a school voucher initiative targeted to disadvantaged students in the US Capital. Vouchers worth up to $7,500 annually are awarded by lottery to students with family incomes near or below the federal poverty line. Students can then use their voucher at any of 60 participating…

The third-year evaluation of the federally funded Washington, D.C. voucher program shows that low-income students offered vouchers in the first two years of the program had modestly higher reading scores after three years but showed no significant difference in mathematics. Students were randomly assigned to treatment and control groups, and the…

This State-specific summary report serves as an assessment of the District of Columbia's Year 1 Race to the Top implementation, highlighting successes and accomplishments, identifying challenges, and providing lessons learned from implementation to date. The Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) manages the District of Columbia…

This paper describes the District of Columbia's progress in implementing a comprehensive and coherent approach to education reform from the time of application through June 30, 2011. In particular, this report highlights key accomplishments over the reporting period in the four reform areas: standards and assessments, data systems to support…

The goals of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act Title I program operated by the Public Schools of the District of Columbia were to provide disadvantaged children with supplemental instructional services to improve their performance in reading and mathematics and to support their affective and psychomotor development. This volume of the…

This evaluation of the 1989-90 Cumulative Deficits in Basic Skills Program (CDBSP) in Washington (District of Columbia) public schools uses achievement gains on the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills (CTBS) and teacher use of specially developed instructional materials to assess program effectiveness. Information was gathered from an analysis of…

These technical appendices give the following information: a comparison of RENP and non-RENP mean Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills (CTBS) Fall 1976 pretest scores; evidence of the existence of an achievement gap between Washington, D.C. and large city norms; number and percentages of students in each of three pretest achievement levels;…

Contents of this evaluation of ESEA Title 1 programs for the District of Columbia, 1966 and 1967, include: development of a statistical model for the evaluation; programs and procedures; patterns of program participation; data-gathering instruments developed for analysis of Title 1 Programs; relationship of program participation to pupil…

THE INVESTIGATORS WERE INTERESTED IN--WHAT PORTIONS OF THE HIGHER HORIZONS PROGRAM COULD BE REPLICABLE, MEASURABLE CHANGES IN STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT, ATTITUDES, AND HABITS AS A RESULT OF THE EXPERIMENT, AND SCHOOL AND COMMUNITY DYNAMICS WHICH PRECIPITATED AND ACCOMPANIED INNOVATIONS. CERTAIN FEATURES OF THE HIGHER HORIZONS PROGRAM FOR CULTURALLY…

The general purpose of this study was to explore the possibility of developing a Parent Participation Reading Clinic home-based instructional model for assisting in the teaching of reading to economically disadvantaged elementary school children. Working within a community-based child health care agency in Washington, D.C., the Parent…