Historically, formative assessment has been credited with increasing student achievement. Student outcomes increase when constructive, immediate, formative feedback is provided in a systematic way for all students. Educators need to implement effective formative assessments in order to deepen learning through more critical thinking and reflection.…

Historical policy stories that situate teachers as the root cause of problems in public schools have long accompanied educational reforms, including No Child Left Behind. This article portrays the history of teacher blame as a defining component of the grammar of American educational reform. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century reformers identified…

Students in poverty need both academic and social supports. Former New York City Schools Chancellor Rudy Crew and scholar Pedro Noguera argue that students in poverty need both intensive academic and social supports. They maintain that U.S. education policy, with its focus on academic accountability, has generally failed to grasp this dual…

Over the past two decades, education underwent a "big data" revolution as states began tracking individual student performance and interim assessments and educational software allowed for a greater granularity of data on students, teachers, and schools. Despite this plethora of new data, considerable gaps in data on early childhood…

This article contributes to the literature on school turnaround by examining the effect of the North Carolina Transformation (NCT) initiative, which was implemented in 75 low-performing schools after the state's efforts to turn around the lowest performing schools under Race to the Top ended, on student reading score growth in grades K-3. Reading…

"The Every Student Succeeds Act" encourages educators to use school improvement strategies backed by rigorous research. This snapshot, based on national surveys administered in 2018, describes what guidance states provided on improvement strategies and how districts selected such strategies in lowest-performing schools. Most states…

After school programs provide low income students and students of color with learning opportunities across both academic and non-academic domains that such students would otherwise not get. In this study, we examined the intersection of school characteristics (e.g., enrollment size, percent minority enrolled, and percent eligible for FARM) and the…

Under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) of 2015, states are accountable for focusing resources on low-performing schools and traditionally underserved students who consistently demonstrate low academic performance. State Goals and Accountability Systems States are required to establish long-term goals for, at minimum, student achievement, high…

The United States considers educating all students to a threshold of adequate outcomes to be a central goal of educational justice. The No Child Left Behind Act introduced evidence-based policy and accountability protocols to ensure that all students receive an education that enables them to meet adequacy standards. Unfortunately, evidence-based…

The persistence of underperformance in schools within large urban districts remains a significant challenge in the U.S. K-12 education system. Education policymakers have enacted legislation aiming at improving these schools through "turnaround" initiatives. However, students attending underperforming schools face multifaceted challenges…

The public narrative surrounding efforts to improve low-performing K-12 schools in the United States has been notably gloomy. But what is known empirically about whether school improvement works, which policies are most effective, which contexts respond best to intervention, and how long it takes? We meta-analyze 141 estimates from 67 studies of…

The purpose of this survey study was to assess the perceived skill level and educational needs of special education paraprofessionals in the area of function-based intervention and to identify paraprofessionals' preferred training delivery method(s) and any variables that affect paraprofessionals' preference for these methods. Special education…

Purpose: The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) represents a notable shift in K-12 accountability, requiring a more comprehensive approach to assessing school performance and a less prescriptive approach to intervening in low-performing schools. In this article, we seek to leverage the experiences of California's CORE (California Office to Reform…

Teaching academic instruction to students with significant cognitive disability (SCD) has been done with success over the past years (Browder, Mims, Spooner, Ahlgrim-Delzell, & Lee, 2008; Hudson & Test, 2011; Mims, Hudson, & Browder, 2012), However, research is scarce and further instructional strategies are needed to help align the…

Under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) of 2015, states and districts are responsible for supporting and improving the quality of low-performing high schools. This brief primer describes how ESSA impacts high school graduation rate goals, low-graduation-rate high schools, funding for high schools, school improvement funding, the High School…