The Title I, Part A program is designed to ensure that all children have a fair, equal, and significant opportunity to obtain a high-quality education and achieve, at a minimum, proficiency on challenging state academic achievement standards and assessments. The program's goal is accomplished by providing supplemental funding for educational…

The standard epistemology requires the use of hard science to gain knowledge and discover the truth. In contrast, Deaf epistemology relies heavily on personal testimonies, personal experiences, and personal accounts to document knowledge. In recent years, a number of deaf schools have adopted deaf-centric policies shaped by Deaf epistemology in an…

The purpose of this report is to evaluate the student achievement performance on the state's standardized tests and Houston Independent School District's (ISD's) norm-referenced tests for students in Title I, Part A schools. This report discusses student performance on the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR), Texas Assessment…

The authors conducted a quasi-experimental investigation of effects on achievement by grade-level teams focused on improving learning. For 2 years (Phase 1), principals-only training was provided. During the final 3 years (Phase 2), school-based training was provided for principals and teacher leaders on stabilizing team settings and using…

In just the last ten years, goaded by broad and still unsettled cultural shifts, education practices have changed dramatically. Schools are no longer just recording and analyzing inputs--dollars spent, number of days of instruction, numbers of students per teacher--but pushing their data-gathering and analysis efforts into the brave new world of…

The purpose of this study was to describe the differences of teachers with and without National Board Certification in relation to their percentages of student competency in high school physical education. Data from the South Carolina Physical Education Assessment Program (SCPEAP) were used as the measure of student competency. Student competency…

This is the second and final report for MDRC's evaluation of the Bay Area School Reform Collaborative (BASRC), a grant-making and support organization in San Francisco, California. BASRC is dedicated to improving student achievement in public schools and narrowing achievement gaps among different racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups. BASRC…

Instructional quality is one of the most important factors in effective teaching. Without it, school reform is impossible. How can leaders develop and implement strategies to improve faculty quality and then manage the process of school reform in today's complex school environments? The authors answer this question through the study of a systemic…

This program was intended to improve the level of educational achievement in the project area through the provision of paraprofessional aides residing in the school community who could provide direct support to the teaching and learning efforts in the classroom. The major thrust of the evaluation was to determine whether teacher aide service had…

We report on comprehensive school reform (CSR) reform in 48 schools over 6 consecutive years. In 1998, a total of 24 schools received CSR awards to improve student achievement. Control schools were carefully matched on 26 demographic variables to form a comparison group. Students' average performance, as represented in publicly available school…

The use of Goal Attainment Scaling to evaluate a home-based educational intervention in which parents acted as tutors of their own elementary-school-aged children is described. Goal Attainment Scaling is a model originally developed for the National Institutes of Mental Health as a means of evaluating the activities of community mental health…

School districts in the U.S. increasingly rely on standardized testing to documentstudent achievement in mathematics, reading, science, and English. Educators and policy-makers have engaged in heated debates as to the effects of such standardized testing practices on actual student achievement. In studying these issues, it is important to examine…

As a result of the Educational Reform Act in 1982, the Mississippi State Board of Education adopted accreditation levels from 1 to 5, with 1 being the lowest level. In 1988, 17 school districts were assigned to the Level 1 status by the Commission on School Accreditation, based on results of the following performance standards: Basic Skills…