Shawnee State University (SSU) founded Project BEAR: Building Emerging and Achieving Readers, an AmeriCorps program, to support literacy development and improve school readiness in the Appalachian region. After the first 2 years of program implementation, areas for growth including enhanced service member recruitment, member onboarding, and…

No Child Left Behind, hereafter referred to as NCLB, has given us an age of accountability for America's schools that includes high stakes tests for students at various grade levels. Those tests are used to measure a child's knowledge of standards in each core subject area including math, science, language arts, and social studies. The standards…

This mixed-methods study researched the special education background experience of principals and the effect on students in the subgroup of Students with Disabilities in making Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). In the state of Ohio, schools and districts are expected to make AYP as a whole and additionally make AYP for each subgroup (various…

Little is known about the leadership practices and behaviors of the building leaders of dropout recovery schools and how these behaviors correlate with the ability of their student population to pass state-required standardized tests. This study analyzed the responses of 8 building leaders of dropout recovery schools regarding their leadership…

The purpose of this study is to make transparent the current National School Lunch Program (NSLP). The first mission of this project is to clarify how the NSLP functions on a day-to-day basis in Columbus, Ohio. Columbus is used as a sample city, yet the aim of this research is to be transferable to other locations. The second objective is to…

Urban public schools in the United States face the problem of failure to reach academic goals of performance mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act. It was hypothesized that use of Senge's leadership model might result in academic performance in one urban elementary school. Based on Senge's shared vision leadership model as the theoretical…

Ohio made value-added law in 2003 and incorporated value-added assessment to its operating standards for teachers and administrators in 2006. Value-added data is used to determine if students are making a year's growth at the end of each school year. Schools and districts receive a rating of "Below Growth, Met Growth, or Above Growth" on…

No Child Left Behind requires school districts to demonstrate adequate yearly progress in mathematics for all students, including the sub-population of disabled students. Given that more than 200 Ohio school districts have implemented Everyday Mathematics (EM) to achieve this mandate, districts need to know if this standards-based program meets…