The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), passed in 2015, succeeded in weakening the least popular parts of the No Child Left Behind act. But, argues Jack Jennings, it's a purely reactive piece of legislation, offering no positive vision for the federal government's role in addressing K-12 education's most urgent problems. ESSA is still young, he…

Kindergarten has become increasingly academically oriented, and U.S. kindergarten teachers are increasingly called upon to implement policies that require assessment and promote accountability. However, little recent research has focused on kindergarten teachers' beliefs about kindergarten readiness. The authors examined teachers' beliefs related…

Since the passage of "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB) in 2001, public schools in the United States have witnessed an influx of reforms intended to elevate students' academic standing in a global economy. The unprecedented federal involvement in education resulting from the passage of NCLB has propelled a nationwide movement to standardize…

The purpose of this study was to determine if attending a four-year-old preschool program had an impact on the academic achievement of elementary age students. With limited funding and the demands of No Child Left Behind legislation, schools are constantly evaluating the effectiveness and cost of ongoing programming. In addition, educational…

One in four students under the age of six comes from an immigrant family in which at least one parent does not speak English. Traditionally, states such as Nevada, California, New Mexico, Arizona and Texas have served the vast majority of English language learner (ELL) students, although the surging growth of this demographic--now 5.5 million…

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 efforts to meet the special needs of migrant students. The purpose of this report was to evaluate the impact of the migrant education program on students'…

For over a decade, professional learning communities (PLCs) have been touted as an effective way to build upon the knowledge and skills of experienced teachers, yet much of the evidence base is derived from self-reports by practitioners. Although several generations of school reform (the standards movement, No Child Left Behind, and now the Common…

The goal of this longitudinal study is to examine the relationships between early child factors (i.e., age at identification, enrollment in early intervention, oral language skills) and school readiness skills (i.e., conceptual knowledge) in a group of young children with hearing loss (HL). Standardized language, cognition, and conceptual…

By the end of the kindergarten, students are expected to possess early academic skills as well as the social maturity to be successful in first grade. Students leaving kindergarten without these readiness skills are sometimes held back in first grade or referred for a special education evaluation in later grades if they fail to make adequate…

When it comes to college readiness, a clear academic disparity exists between Latino students and their White and Asian peers. Not only are Latinos less likely to go to college, but also, once in college, their completion rate is much lower than any other group. Most research thus far has focused primarily on how the college environment can…

This study of four national English language arts college readiness standards sets compares content alignment and level of alignment of the standards statements in three comparison sets to a benchmark set, the American Diploma Project (ADP), and analyzes the cognitive complexity of all four sets. Specifically, this report addresses two primary…

Backers of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law based their support on the belief that teachers and administrators primarily were responsible for low levels of achievement by America's poor. This one-sided view about who is responsible for the nation's achievement gap is both inadequate and unsupported by the evidence. The author argues that harsh…

The campaign for universal preschool education in the United States has gained great momentum. Precisely as strategists intended, many Americans have come to believe that pre-kindergarten is a good and necessary thing for government to provide, even that not providing it will cruelly deprive the youngest residents of their birthrights, blight…

This paper investigates the placement of students at an urban Ohio college campus in developmental mathematics and Intermediate Algebra courses. We have found that the ACT Mathematics and COMPASS Domain I (Algebra) Placement scores both correlate well with success in the Intermediate Algebra course and that, although females have lower placement…

President Obama is the most prominent of a growing number of American policymakers to embrace the idea that some form of postsecondary education is crucial to students' success after high school. This year's edition of "Diplomas Count", a report by "Education Week" and the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center,…