"Open Court Reading©" is a reading program for grades K-6 published by McGraw-Hill Education that is designed to teach decoding, comprehension, inquiry, and writing in a three-part logical progression. Part One of each unit, Preparing to Read, focuses on phonemic awareness, sounds and letters, phonics, fluency, and word knowledge. Part…

The purpose of this qualitative exploratory case study based on Danielson's (2002) assertion that when teachers learn, student achievement improves was to examine how teachers created a collaborative learning experience through Professional Learning Community (PLC) concepts to implement Response to Intervention (RtI) with at-risk students. The…

State of Michigan Education report -- "Stalled to Soaring: Michigan's Path to Educational Recovery" -- is the result of months of research and a year of Education Trust-Midwest's efforts to monitor where Michigan is making progress on improving public education. The report findings include: (1) Michigan now ranks in the bottom five…

The Bureau of Indian Education (BIE) is responsible for approximately 41,051 American Indian and Alaska Native children at 183 elementary and secondary schools on 64 reservations in 23 states. The educational services the BIE provides is vital to current and future students who are their tribes' future. This report presents Special Education…

Minnesota Reading Corps (MRC) is the largest AmeriCorps State program in the country. The goal of MRC is to ensure that students become successful readers and meet reading proficiency targets by the end of the third grade. Starting in 2011, the "Corporation for National and Community Service" (CNCS) sponsored a randomized controlled…

In 2012, Oxfordshire County Council commissioned the National Literacy Trust to deliver a two-year campaign, the Oxfordshire Reading Campaign, to address falling Key Stage 1 literacy levels in the county's primary schools, which were amongst the worst in the country. The aims of the campaign were to increase the proportion of children reaching the…

Previous research suggests that there are academic benefits when students and teachers share the same race/ethnicity because such teachers can serve as role models, mentors, advocates, or cultural translators. In this paper, we obtain estimates of achievement changes as students are assigned to teachers of different races/ethnicities from grades 3…

The study reviewed here examined the effect of charter schools on annual student achievement growth in reading and math in 25 states, the District of Columbia, and New York City. The study primarily used data on students in grades 3-8, but additional elementary and high school grades were included for several states. The authors reported that…

The 2014 ACT results for AISD students continued to improve this year. The district's average ACT composite score and all subject area scores exceeded the state and national averages. Highlights of the ACT results are presented in this report.

This study advances our understanding of the relationships among the different elements of a teacher evaluation model and its usefulness in predicting student learning. Important questions arise about teacher evaluation systems, including (a) the magnitude of correlations among the sources of evidence used for identifying teacher effectiveness and…

Much of the achievement gap between rich and poor students can be attributed to out-of-school factors, yet few schools have a comprehensive, coordinated system for addressing students' nonacademic needs. Within a group of Catholic schools located in one city, this study examined academic achievement on the Stanford Achievement Test battery in…

The research base on how to effectively intervene to improve the reading fluency of students with academic and behavioral disabilities at the middle school level does not provide a strong support for evidence- based practices with this age group. The purpose of this study was to extend the body of research on reading fluency interventions to…

A number of challenges continue to influence the schooling experience of Black students. While some progress has been made for some, chronic underperformance has remained largely unchanged over the past two decades. What has become increasingly a part of the experiences of Black children and other students of color has been the increasing police…

Recent efforts to attract and retain effective educators and to improve teaching practices have focused on reforming evaluation and compensation systems for teachers and principals. In 2006, Congress established the Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF), which provides grants to support performance-based compensation systems for teachers and principals in…

We evaluate a tracking program in a large urban district where schools with at least one gifted fourth grader create a separate "gifted/high achiever" classroom. Most seats are filled by non-gifted high achievers, ranked by previous-year test scores. We study the program's effects on the high achievers using (1) a rank-based regression…