The Houston Independent School District (HISD) has provided free prekindergarten classes for eligible Houston area four-year old students since the 1985-1986 school year. HISD offers full-day prekindergarten programs to all eligible students within its attendance boundaries. HISD collaborates with four federally-funded Head Start agencies that…

The Migrant Education Program (MEP) is authorized under Title I of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) of 2015. In an effort to comply with Title I, the HISD MEP works to assist migrant students to overcome the challenges of mobility, cultural and language barriers, social isolation, and other difficulties associated with a migratory lifestyle.…

The Migrant Education Program (MEP) is authorized under Title I of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) of 2015. Title I states that the purpose of the MEP is to assist states in their efforts to meet the special needs of migrant students. This report examines the impact of MEP on migrant students' performance on the Iowa, Logramos, the State of…

The Migrant Education Program (MEP) is authorized under Title I of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB). Title I states that the purpose of the MEP is to assist states in their efforts to meet the special needs of migrant students. This report includes demographic characteristics of migrant students served by the program in 2014-2015, a…

This study hypothesized that HISD prekindergarten participation consistently correlated with better educational outcomes for students. Taking into account students' age differences through kindergarten enrollment, propensity score matching controlled for students' background characteristics. Three cohorts of students in this study were eligible or…

The Houston Independent School District offers two primary bilingual programs for Spanish-speaking English-language learners (ELLs). In both programs, students may transition into a pre-exit phase of bilingual education so long as they meet certain performance criteria. In this Pre-Exit phase, predominantly English-language instruction is used in…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of Mentoring Mathematical Minds (M3) units on gains in mathematics achievement and English proficiency of mathematically promising English language learners (MPELLs) in the third grade. The M3 program, developed by Gavin et al., was implemented for 1 year with treatment MPELLs (n = 86) but not…

The Cultural Heritage Bilingual Program (CHBP) was developed for English Language Learner (ELL) students from language groups not served by current bilingual programs in the Houston Independent School District (HISD), which are designed for Spanish-speaking ELLs. The largest group of students in this category consists of ELLs whose home language…

This is a research brief of a longer report, also published as "Bilingual Education and English as a Second Language Summary Report, 2009-2010". Twenty-nine percent of students enrolled in Austin Independent School District were English language learners in 2009-2010. The majority of them (62%) continued to make progress in English…

Validity and reliability issues in standardized testing of students of limited English proficiency (LEP) were studied. Existing data from four different school sites were obtained for LEP and non-LEP students for three different standardized tests, the Stanford Achievement Tests (Ninth edition), the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills, and the Language…

This study was conducted to investigate the dimensionality of language tests by means of latent variable models for categorical data. It differs from previous studies by conducting the analysis at the level of the original items using the structural modeling approach of B. Muthen (1984) for dichotomous and ordered polytomous variables. In this…

A demonstration program to serve the needs of children who are identified as limited English proficient (LEP) was developed and implemented. Each of six schools in the Austin Independent School District (AISD) contained a class of 18 students, 3 of whom were non-LEP. The non-LEP children served as English-speaking models for their LEP peers.…

In October 1989 Alaska conducted its statewide student assessment. Over 23,000 students in grades 4, 6, and 8 completed the reading, mathematics, and language arts sections of the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (ITBS). At the same time, a series of questionnaires asked building principals about their schools' philosophy, climate, and problems; asked…

This paper isolates and examines separately three distinct sources of error in essay scores: lack of agreement between raters; inconsistencies in performance within mode of discourse, and inconsistencies in performance between modes of discourse. Essay prompts in the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (ITBS) Writing Supplement were designed to assess…

This study attempts to determine the extent to which performance on educational tests is dependent upon language proficiency. Three questions are involved: (1) Will the dictation and the cloze tests prove to be as successful in distinguishing degrees of proficiency among native speakers as among second language learners? (2) How well will scores…