The San Diego Unified School District, the nation's eighth-largest, launched an ambitious program of literacy reforms in 2000 aimed at narrowing reading achievement gaps. Known as the Blueprint for Student Success, the program ran through 2005. The reforms succeeded in boosting the reading achievement of students who had been identified as lagging…

This report presents early results from a rigorous evaluation of a performance-based scholarship program that was implemented at three community colleges in Ohio during the 2008-2009 academic year. The program in Ohio that is the subject of this report is part of MDRC's national Performance-Based Scholarship (PBS) Demonstration, which was launched…

The expectation for schools to continually improve outcomes for students underscores the importance of tapping teacher leaders' contributions in school improvement and renewal efforts. As National Board (NB) certification has become a common feature of state and district policies to improve teaching and learning, it is worthwhile to explore how…

Before revising the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation under the new administration, policy makers need to be informed as to whether or not the NCLB labeling formula adequately distinguishes good-quality schools from poor-quality schools. This study tests this question, using rich descriptive data for Milwaukee's urban school district (MPS).…

The first objective of this study was to establish the relation between intellectual ability and metacognitive skillfulness as predictors of learning performance in young students (aged 12 years). Furthermore, the generality vs. domain-specificity of metacognitive skillfulness was investigated. Thirty-two first-year secondary-school students…

For most facilities leaders, sustainability is nothing new. The authors have observed repeatedly over several decades that administrative and facilities staff have often taken the lead in initiating many of the most effective and visible efforts on campuses to dramatically curb energy use and waste and to contain costs, even during times of rapid…

A survey of 442 beginning teachers, 57 mentors, and 33 administrators asked participants to rate the support provided to first-year teachers. Respondents identified persons who provided the most support, and responses were compared. Generally, new teachers indicated that administrators and other teachers had been more helpful than were mentors. In…

This paper describes the facilitators and barriers to implementing an attachment-based intervention in early education and care settings, the Partnerships in Early Childhood program (PIEC), based on findings from the process evaluation of its first year of implementation. The paper focuses on four areas: the nature of the partnership and program…

In the fragmented out-of-school-time sector, defining and measuring quality in terms of staff behaviors at the point of service provides a common framework that can reduce obstacles to cross-sector and cross-program performance improvement efforts and streamline adoption of data-driven accountability policies. This chapter views the point of…

Low-income preschool children face many risks to their social-emotional development that can affect their school experience and social outcomes for years to come. Although there are some promising approaches to improving young children's social-emotional competence, the evidence base is limited, particularly on the effectiveness of these…

The School Improvement Grants (SIG) program, which was created in 2002, funds reforms in the country's lowest-performing schools with the goal of improving student outcomes, such as standardized test scores and graduation rates. Congress greatly increased SIG program funding from $125 million available in fiscal year 2007--the first year the…

Despite the popularity of performance funding among policymakers and policy advocates, only half of all states have ever created a performance funding system for higher education. State performance funding systems have also been surprisingly unstable. Nearly half of those states that established performance funding systems for higher education…

In 2006, Governor Edward Rendell announced a three-year, $200 million Classrooms for the Future program to provide technology and technology support to schools across the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, beginning in the 2006-2007 school year. The purpose of this research study is to examine the change process of the diffusion of technology within…

This field-based action research practicum investigated how students who have completed culinary training programs in Massachusetts public secondary schools perform in post-secondary coursework. The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education has developed the Vocational Technical Education (VTE) Framework for Culinary Arts that outlines…

This study was undertaken as an attempt to assess the effects of storytelling and reading aloud on fourth and fifth grade children's comprehension and oral reading fluency of both narrative and expository texts. The independent variable involved two strategies for introducing stories to children (storytelling and story reading) and a comparison…