The purpose of this report is to present and discuss competing accountability approaches, or models, designed to systematically indicate how a school's students are performing academically. Within the framework of the current federally mandated accountability legislation, increased interest in models measuring school performance has caused…

This guide is for educators who want to include social emotional learning (SEL) in their schools and classrooms. Focusing in detail on the process of implementing an SEL program, the author offers direct, usable guidance for busy school administrators, district supervisors, guidance counselors, and teachers of grades 412. In a handy, manual…

After the first year, funding for the Reading Recovery program in the Muscogee County School District in Georgia was to be contingent upon getting results that would document the success of Reading Recovery in the system. The following measures were used for program evaluation: An Observation Survey of Early Literacy Achievement (Clay, 1993); Iowa…

This study examined relationships between schools' efforts to involve families in their children's education and student performance on standardized achievement tests in the Baltimore schools. Data gathered by the National Network of Partnership Schools was combined with those collected by the state for the mandated Maryland School Performance…

New American Schools (NAS) was formed in 1991 to create and develop whole-school designs that would be adopted by schools throughout the country in order to improve student performance. This book is a retrospective on NAS and draws together the finding from RAND research. Chapter 1, the introduction, gives an overview of NAS, RAND's purpose and…

This paper describes a 1-year study of 120 fifth-grade students whose teachers participated in a program entitled Project SMILE (Science and Math Integrated with Literary Experiences). The purpose of the study was to determine the extent to which the classroom implementation of Project SMILE positively influenced the classroom environment and…

Buffalo's Early Childhood Centers, which grew out of court-ordered desegregation plans, are described and evaluated in this article in terms of student achievement, parental involvement, and racial balancing. (IAH)

Schools and school systems will improve their chances of making a good choice of school reform program if they determine: (1) the program's goals and objectives; (2) the program's research base; and (3) the resources, in terms of money and human effort, required to make the program work. (SLD)

When introduced a decade ago, development planning was regarded as a strategy to help (British) schools manage change. Recent evidence suggests that schools exhibiting "best practice" in development planning have transcended this usage and now employ development planning to enhance pupil achievement. This paper examines the latter,…

The Baltimore Curriculum Project brought direct instruction (DI) and core knowledge (Core) to several Baltimore City public schools. This article describes implementation of DI and Core at one elementary school, documenting the dramatic growth in student achievement since implementation of DI in reading and examining distractions that interfered…

This study presents a rare opportunity to systematically examine the relationship between teachers' implementation of the America's Choice comprehensive school reform model and gains in student learning in an urban, at-risk school district. The results provide empirical evidence of relationships between student learning gains and variation in…

Responding to mandates from the Tennessee Higher Education Commission to eliminate "remedial" or "developmental" courses from state-funded, four-year institutions, the University of Tennessee at Martin (UTM) Department of English developed a college-level pre-first-year writing program for entering students identified as…

We examined the challenges faced by 4 high-need urban schools when trying to implement Success for All (SFA). We wanted to understand SFA instruction as well as how SFA fit into the larger school context. Over a span of almost 2 years, we observed 45 SFA lessons (21 complete and 24 partial) across the 4 schools, taught by 30 teachers. We analyzed…

In 2001, the U.S. Department of Education and the Ministry of Education in China entered into a bilateral partnership to develop a technology-driven approach to foreign language learning that integrated gaming, immersion, voice recognition, problem-based learning tasks, and other features that made it a significant research and development pilot…

In an effort to identify instructional methods that might improve mathematics learning at the grade 4 level when used in a variety of educational settings under typical conditions, the REL Mid-Atlantic research team looked for promising, replicable practices that were being used broadly by teachers in U.S. schools, for which research showed…