West Virginia is a nationally recognized leader for its strong commitment to high-quality early learning education programming. West Virginia is one of a very small handful of states in the nation with free, full-day, five-day kindergarten for all children AND voluntary universal pre-k to all four-year-old children (and three-year-old children…

Over the years, the nation's large urban school districts have consistently learned from the progress of their peer districts across the country. In 2002, the board of directors of the Council of the Great City Schools (Council) authorized what became known as the Performance Measurement and Benchmarking Project to develop and implement key…

How are California's students doing? And are all groups of students receiving the same opportunities for educational success? How do patterns of educational outcomes in California compare to those in other states, and how have they changed in the last decade? In this study, the authors seek to provide a portrait of the state of educational…

A growing number of states experimented with alternative governance structures in response to pressure to raise student achievement. Post-Katrina experimentation in New Orleans was widely regarded as a model example of new governance reforms and provided a unique opportunity to learn about the variation in student achievement and behavior within…

The goal of this article is to explore the heterogeneity of state investments in elementary and secondary education over the period from 1993 to 2013, evaluating both the level of funding over time and the extent to which funding is targeted to districts serving high-poverty populations. This paper then explores a) whether those levels and…

Ensuring teacher and speech and language pathology graduates are prepared to work collaboratively together to meet the diverse language literacy learning needs of children is an important goal. This study investigated the efficacy of a 3-h inter-professional education program focused on explicit instruction in the language skills that underpin…

In 2013 Spain introduced a series of educational reforms explicitly inspired by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2012 results. These reforms were mainly implemented in secondary education--based upon the assumption that this is where Spain's educational problems lie. This paper questions this assumption by attempting to…

Children's early home learning experiences are important influences on children's adjustment and achievement in the early years of school. This study explores the relationships between parental beliefs about school readiness, family engagement in home learning activities, on children's attitudes to school as reported by parents, and children's…

How school librarians focus on activating critical thinking through traditional literacy development can proactively set the stage for the deep thinking that occurs in all literacy development. The critical-thinking skills students build while becoming accomplished readers and writers provide the foundation for learning in a variety of…

This study examined the effects of peer-mediated oral reading fluency instruction and narrative texts on the reading fluency and comprehension skills of adolescent struggling readers in an alternative high school setting over a period of 10 weeks. The results of this study indicate that peer-mediated repeated reading appears to be the most…

Background: Many scholars have espoused the use of culturally responsive instruction (CRI) for closing achievement gaps, yet there is a paucity of research supporting its effectiveness. In this article, we share results of a mixed methods study that examined the use of the Culturally Responsive Instruction Observation Protocol (CRIOP) as a…

School composition is a topic that has gained increasing attention from researchers over the past few years, as it has been found that the socio-economic characteristics of students are associated with their achievement. However, most research has been cross-sectional and carried out in industrialised countries. In this study, we use parental…

The Reading Apprenticeship is an intervention that has been shown in previous studies to increase struggling readers, tested reading achievement by 8 to 9 months during a 12 week, in-school program. This article reports on the first study of the Reading Apprenticeship method conducted in the summer using parents, rather than supervised volunteers,…

Although school attainment is a cumulative process combining mastery of both academic and behavioral skills, most studies have offered only a piecemeal view of the associations between middle-childhood capacities and subsequent schooling outcomes. Using a 20-year longitudinal data set, this study estimates the association between children's…

Over the years, the annual "What's Hot, What's Not" survey by Jack Cassidy has served as an important indicator for issues in the continuously changing landscape of literacy education within North America. In "Beyond the Common Core," Cassidy, Ortlieb, and GroteGarcia (2016) note the meteoric rise of the Common Core State…