Out-of-school time (OST) initiatives, defined as programs that operate in and out of school settings, serve young people, their families, and the communities around them. These initiatives are often created to close opportunity gaps that can exist for at-risk students and to meet the needs of previously assessed concerns for communities. For the…

Chronic absenteeism is the most extreme form of truancy and includes students who miss more than 10% of the school year (Conry & Richards, 2018). The reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 2015 required states to choose a non-cognitive measure to evaluate school performance. Tennessee has chronic absenteeism selected…

Class-Wide Function-Related Intervention Teams (CW-FIT) is a classroom management system using a group contingency involving direct teaching of classroom rules/skills, differential reinforcement of appropriate behaviors, and minimized social attention to inappropriate behaviors. We investigated elementary school teachers' implementation of CW-FIT…

The purpose of this study was to examine the experiences of academically successful Foster Care Alumni (FCAs) in Tennessee who enrolled in postsecondary education, either a trade school, a two-year college, or a four-year university, and graduated from that postsecondary institution. Youth in foster care faced barriers to their education in K-12…

Teachers with less than 5 years of teaching experience in low socioeconomic status schools are more likely to leave education than those who have taught in a higher socioeconomic school, often leaving schools in low socioeconomic areas struggling to fill vacancies and to keep a full teaching staff. Many students are high-risk if they attend a…

Minority and other at-risk students are disproportionately affected by punitive disciplinary practices in schools. These disciplinary actions' long-term and short-term effects include losing instructional time, low academic achievement, dropping out of school, and a chance of becoming part of the school-to-prison pipeline. Implementing restorative…

Since the early 2000s, federal, state, and local lawmakers and educators have worked to combat the "wait to fail" mentality and support higher student grade level academic achievements. Educators were tasked with finding teaching methods that better served academically struggling students, some of whom had specified learning…

The Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 requires the use of evidence in adopting programs, particularly for children with reading disabilities. A quasi-experimental study was conducted to evaluate the effects of a literacy intervention called Helping Early Readers Obtain Excellence in Special Education (HEROES), developed for children ages six to…

In response to the high cost of textbooks and other course materials, "Inclusive Access" automatic billing programs allow the cost of a discounted eTextbook and/or courseware to be automatically added to a student's tuition bill at the time of course registration. Touted for their ability to lower costs and provide students with access…

In this article, the Tennessee's Voluntary Prekindergarten (TN-VPK) program in general and the Shelby County Schools' VPK program in particular are analyzed using the policy instruments of regulation, finance, and support services. The geospatial analysis (Geographic Information Systems or "GIS") indicates that many of VPK's site…

Social, emotional, and academic development (SEAD) is a holistic approach to supporting students' development and learning that is integral to ensuring positive outcomes in school and beyond. Schools must ensure students experience healthy development and rigorous learning. Unfortunately, students of color, students from low-income backgrounds,…

The National Guard Youth ChalleNGe program is a residential, quasi-military program for youth ages 16 to 18 who are experiencing difficulty in traditional high school. This report covers the program years 2018-2019 and is the fourth in a series of annual reports that RAND Corporation researchers have issued over the course of a research project…

As the field moves toward adaptive and individualized behavior intervention, it is important to identify and consider relevant student characteristics as potential levers (i.e., critical factors) for improving intervention effectiveness. Motivated by previous findings suggesting that behavioral profiles and teachers' perceptions of students with…

The purpose of this study was to determine if a significant relationship existed between the variable of teacher's self-reported perceptions of Response to Intervention (RTI) and self-reported implementation of RTI with years of teaching experience. RTI can be defined as high-quality classroom instruction supported by research-based interventions…

This study investigated the effectiveness of an afterschool reading intervention program(ASRIP) in addressing the problem of at-risk English 10 students in an urban high school in danger of failing the Tennessee End of Course Test (TEOCT) because of low TEOCT pretest scores, poor regular school attendance (RSA), and low grade point average(GPA).…