English language learners were more likely to attend school and to meet the STAAR passing standards in reading and math when their teachers used creative teaching strategies more frequently. These findings coincide well with the research that encourages teachers of foreign languages to be creative in their teaching so that students not only…

"Green Dot Public Schools" is a nonprofit organization that operates more than 20 public charter middle and high schools in California, Tennessee, and Washington. The "Green Dot Public Schools" model emphasizes high quality teaching, strong school leadership, a curriculum that prepares students for college, and partnerships…

Ninth Grade Academies (NGAs)--also called Freshman Academies--have attracted national attention as a particularly intensive and promising approach for supporting a successful transition for high school freshmen. An NGA is a self-contained learning community for ninth-graders that operates as a school within a school. NGAs have four core structural…

Nationally, there are dozens of established indicators of school performance and thousands of possible combinations of those indicators to create an accountability framework. How do policy makers decide which variables are most important? This relates to measurement modeling -- that is, how to incorporate all pieces of the puzzle into a…

The predictive value of selection criteria on outcome data from two cohorts of students (Total N = 525) accepted to an urban magnet high school were evaluated. Regression analyses of typical screening variables (suspensions, absences, metropolitan achievement tests, middle school grade point averages [GPAs], Matrix Analogies test scores, and…

The Houston Independent School District's (HISD) goal is to produce capable, confident young adults who are poised to excel in whatever they do. Whether they emerge from high school with dreams of pursuing higher education or choose to enter the workforce immediately, HISD wants its graduates to be ready to succeed. One way they assess their…

At the request of Pittsburgh Public Schools (PPS) and the Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers (PFT), Mathematica has developed value-added models (VAMs) that aim to estimate the contributions of individual teachers, teams of teachers, and schools to the achievement growth of their students. The authors' work in estimating value-added in Pittsburgh…

Much of the literature related to the skimming or cropping of students by charter schools has ignored special education students. This article examines the relationship between the severity of student disabilities and their likelihood of having attended an Arizona charter school in the 2002-2003 school year. After adjusting for student traits,…

A meta-analysis of the relationship between class attendance in college and college grades reveals that attendance has strong relationships with both class grades (k = 69, N = 21,195, p = 0.44) and GPA (k = 33, N = 9,243, p = 0.41). These relationships make class attendance a better predictor of college grades than any other known predictor of…

This article addresses the relationship between academic achievement and the student characteristics of absence and mobility. Mobility is a measure of how often a student changes schools. Absence is how often a student misses class. Standardized test scores are used as proxies for academic achievement. A model for the full joint distribution of…

This document presents data on Wisconsin school performance for 1993-94. Data were derived from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI), private firms that administer assessments, and Wisconsin's 427 public school districts and the state schools for the deaf and visually handicapped. The report includes introductory material,…

Special Competition Bilingual Enrichment Academic Russian Program is a federally-funded program that served 623 native Russian-speaking, limited-English-proficient (LEP) students in nine public and two private high schools in New York City in 1992-93, its first year of operation. Students received instruction in English as a second language (ESL),…