This article describes how a Washington State School District increased professional learning around the Common Core State Standards. The challenge was how to establish a way for career and technical education and electives teachers to learn and apply Common Core in their classes. Weaving Common Core literacy standards into vocational and…

Iowa is working to provide teachers with more effective and relevant professional development that measurably increases their instructional skills and their students' learning growth. This is particularly important as new Iowa Core Standards with higher expectations for student learning are put in place. While the Iowa Core focuses on what…

Researchers at NIET and elsewhere have studied the effectiveness of "TAP: The System for Teacher and Student Advancement" (TAP) in raising student achievement, improving the quality of instruction and increasing the ability of high-need schools to recruit, retain and support effective teachers. This document describes some of the most…

Approximately 30 states are now adopting teacher evaluation policies that include student learning objectives (SLOs), which are classroom-specific student test growth targets set by teachers and approved (and scored) by principals. Today state and district leaders are trying to determine the appropriate level of guidance and oversight to provide…

Given the vital importance of using a scientific approach for curriculum development, the authors employed a design experiment methodology (Brown, 1992; Shavelson et al., 2003) to develop and evaluate, FUSION, a first grade mathematics intervention intended for students with or at-risk for mathematics disabilities. FUSION, funded through IES…

This report provides information on Austin Independent School District's bilingual and English as a Second Language programs implemented in 2016-2017, summarizing the numbers of students served, and students' language acquisition and academic performance.

Act 82 of 2012 established new standards for Pennsylvania's teacher evaluation system, including the incorporation of student performance measures in ratings decisions. Since 2009, approximately 35 states have amended teacher evaluation systems, with student achievement playing an increasingly prominent role. This count includes neighboring…

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has invested in the development and dissemination of high quality instructional and formative assessment tools to support teachers' incorporation of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) into their classroom instruction. Literacy experts have developed a framework and a set of templates that teachers can use…

This experimental study examined how the reading and writing development of sixth-grade L2 students was affected by syntactic enhancement. Visual-syntactic text formatting (VSTF) technology, which visualizes syntactic structures, was used to convert a textbook to the one with syntactic enhancement. The sample (n = 282), which was drawn from a…

This qualitative study examined the actions of district and school leaders in changing from a traditional age-based grade-level structure to a standards-based student grouping model in a Western school district. Based on interview, observation, and artifact data collected over 5 years, the findings identify specific leadership actions that…

This qualitative case study explored factors that have influenced literacy success of Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) students in the low-income, poverty stricken Delta Region of Arkansas. The study examined progress made since implementation of the KIPP Program and the influence the program had made upon student achievement in literacy at the…

Prior to the mandatory testing and reporting required by the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), school improvement efforts were shown to lack coherence (Newman, Smith, Allensworth, & Bryk, 2001) and often included conflicting programs (Hatch, 2002). Part of the theory of performance-based accountability in general, and NCLB in particular, was…

Populations of minority students the United States have increased steadily over the past few decades to 42 percent of public school enrollment (Echevarria, 2011). English language learners (ELLs) are the fastest growing population of students enrolled in public schools across the United States. Nationally, if an ELL speaks English with difficulty,…

Two decades of research have documented what now is common knowledge: no in-school factor matters more to students' educational experiences and outcomes than the effectiveness of their teacher. As a result, the national airspace is increasingly crowded with proposed reforms and initiatives designed to boost teacher performance, including new…

In the United States, populations identified as linguistically and culturally diverse (LCD) are increasing at the fastest rate in public schools (Samway & McKeon, 2007). LCD students have not performed as well as their monolingual and/or affluent peers on state mandated assessments. No Child Left Behind Act (2001) stressed this disparity as "the…