The Summer 2013 issue of "Voices in Urban Education" presents an interview with Dania Vazquez, founding principal of the Margarita Muñiz Academy, a Boston public high school offering dual-language education in Spanish and English. The first dual-language high school in Massachusetts, this Innovation School opened in the fall of 2012 with…

The purpose of this study was to expand the literature on student persistence in community colleges through three research innovations. First, the literature on student persistence in community colleges was expanded by applying theory to the identification and testing of predictors. Second, it was expanded by validating retention prediction…

This brief examines the series of events that led to the Highland Park school district being converted to a system of charter public schools in 2012. Used as a strategy to help the district eliminate its large fiscal debt while still providing resident students with a local public school option, Highland Park's charter conversion is one of the…

The literature describes various approaches that community colleges use to achieve institutional effectiveness; however there is no information about how Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs) go about this process. The purpose of this article is to review some principles and processes of accountability and to describe the strategic review and…

This study examines the effects of including the summer period on value-added assessments (VAA) of teacher and school performance at the early grades. The results indicate that 40-62% of the variance in VAA estimates originates from the summer period, depending on the outcome (i.e., reading or math achievement gains). Furthermore, when summer is…

This article evaluates the impact and cost-effectiveness of offering an innovative middle school model--the Sistema de Aprendizaje Tutorial (SAT)--to Honduran villages instead of traditional middle schools. We identified a matched sample of villages with either type of school and collected baseline data among primary school graduates eligible to…

When lotteries are infeasible, researchers must rely on observational methods to estimate charter effectiveness at raising student test scores. Considerable attention has been paid to observational studies by the Stanford Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), which have analyzed charter performance in 27 states. However, the…

Given the current focus on school evaluation and accountability, it is vitally important to capture those differences among schools that can be expected to contribute to student success as measured by students' behavioral, emotional, and academic outcomes. The current practice of comparing "district" and "charter" schools, for…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the perceived effects of "Principal-Leadership" behaviors, and if they were effective in positively influencing school performance and student success in Residential Schools for Secondary Level Deaf Students. Specifically, it investigated the degree to which the Principal-Leader's…

As the education policy landscape shifts toward a system of outcomes-based accountability, evaluation and research have grown increasingly vital. This is especially true for for-profit education firms, which must overcome skepticism, scrutiny, or even outright hostility in a field that has long been suspicious of the profit motive and where the…

There is some evidence to indicate that chronically low-performing schools, whether improving student performance or not, often report pursuing substantially similar policies, programs, and practices. However, while chronically low-performing schools may pursue similar school improvement strategies, there is some evidence that the level and…

This policy brief provides principal evaluation system designers information about the technical soundness and cost (i.e., time requirements) of publicly available school climate surveys. The authors focus on the technical soundness of school climate surveys because they believe that using validated and reliable surveys as an outcomes measure can…

In this paper, the research on the perceptions of gender differences in leadership styles is explored. The study also attempts to determine whether there are differences in overall school performance for male versus female school principals. The methodology involved a mixed-model ANOVA analysis of findings from 31 principals and 236 teachers…

The purpose of this exploratory quantitative research study was to determine if middle schools in which higher levels of servant leadership are evident perform better on school effectiveness measures than middle schools that exhibit lower degrees of servant leadership. Furthermore, it sought to identify contextual factors that were correlated with…

This study examined the collective teacher efficacy in selected elementary schools, specifically exploring the extent to which those schools demonstrate collective efficacy, the nature of collective efficacy in those schools, and the underlying belief systems and tacit assumptions that may inform that efficacy. The first phase of a mixed methods…