This book chronicles the journey of seven schools serving students of poverty, English Language Learners (ELLs), and students of color, which were able to sustain school improvement for a decade on either state and/or national criteria that measure student performance outcomes. The book shares stories of these seven schools and demonstrates that…

This study examines aspects of school culture by way of teachers' identities. The research utilizes quantitative and qualitative inquiry in an attempt to capture both a static snapshot of the culture and a thicker description of that snapshot by examining one low-performing, urban elementary school's implementation of academic optimism…

We examined the persistence of teacher effects from grade to grade on lower-performing students using data from Project STAR. Teacher effects were computed as residual classroom achievement within schools. Teacher effects in one grade predicted achievement in following grades using quantile regression. Results consistently indicated that all…

Using Singapore as a case study, this paper examines how the discourses of democratic elitism and meritocracy help allocate different citizen roles to students and define the nature of the social studies citizenship education programmes for different educational tracks. While the Singapore education system is not unique in its stratification of…

Kansas City (Missouri) Public Schools is at a crossroads. The district has struggled for decades with poor academic achievement, dwindling enrollment and budget, and short-term superintendents--27 in the past 40 years. Most recently, after a two-year stint during which he helped the district get its financial house in order, closing nearly half of…

As a part of Response to Intervention, for three years, ten reading interventionists provided supplemental support to readers. They formed a learning community, took an inquiry-based approach to assessment and developed a theory of what students needed to know and be able to do as readers. They addressed and learned from several other challenges:…

This paper reports on school-university collaboration during an action research project, which aimed to build a writing pedagogy for students with Learning Disabilities in the trilingual, biliterate educational context of Hong Kong. The project was established through interpersonal relationships built from the ground up between stakeholders from a…

In this article we quantitatively and qualitatively analyze a sample of novice programmer compilation log data, exploring whether (or how) low-achieving, average, and high-achieving students vary in their grasp of these introductory concepts. High-achieving students self-reported having the easiest time learning the introductory programming…

This research examined differences in causal attributions and an exam score in a developmental mathematics course based on student classification: traditional, minimally nontraditional, moderately nontraditional, and highly nontraditional as well as grade and gender among nontraditional students. Statistical analysis revealed significant…

This study investigated the relation between multidimensional aspects of high school students' perceptions of their parental involvement and their achievement. It explored differences in socio-economic backgrounds, ethnicity, gender, and higher and lower achieving students, and a structural model was developed to further investigate these…

Seventy-six fifth-year students from low-socioeconomic status backgrounds participated in three different instructional conditions in an intervention study. The first combined strategy training in top-level structuring and interrelated motivational support; the second implemented the strategy training only; and the third was a control condition…

This is a case study about a group of African American parents that banded together in an effort to increase their own involvement, the involvement of other African American parents, and the success of African American students at one public high school. The various ways in which this group of parents sought to accomplish their goals, however, was…

This is an impact evaluation of the Technical Support to Failing Schools Program, a Chilean compensatory program that provided 4-year in-school technical assistance to low-performing schools to improve students' academic achievement. The author implemented a quasi-experimental design by using difference-in-differences estimation combined with…

The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which high school English teachers working in urban high schools in a persistently failing school district in the Northeast exemplified teaching practices that were culturally relevant and culturally responsive to the needs of students of diverse backgrounds. Au's (1998) proposed theoretical…

The Rhode Island Department of Education determined that 56% of high school juniors in public schools are not meeting mathematics performance standards. If a student is not proficient in school, then his or her ability and desire to continue education are diminished, raising the chances of drop out. Hispanic students have the highest dropout rate…