School districts required under No Child Left Behind to provide supplemental educational services (SES) to students in schools that are not making adequate yearly progress rely heavily on the private sector to offer choice in service provision. If the market does not work to drive out ineffective providers, students will be less likely to gain…

The Cape York Aboriginal Australian Academy (CYAAA), which began operation as part of the government schooling system in 2010, incorporates activities across three overlapping "domains": Class--the formal schooling component; Culture--Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultural knowledge; and Club--sporting, cultural, music and physical…

Most previous studies in blended learning simply involved on-site and online instruction without considering students' control of their own learning in these two different modalities. The purpose of this study was to investigate how college students with English reading difficulties integrate their conceptions of and approaches to blended learning…

This paper presents a case study designed to educate students in pre-service teacher education programs about the importance of a comprehensive eye exam. The case study chronicles a family's multi-year search for solutions to their child's reading difficulties. The research supporting the case study explores the connection between vision…

This article assesses the effects of Tulsa, Oklahoma's school-based prekindergarten program on the school readiness of children with special needs using a regression discontinuity design. Participation in the pre-K program was associated with significant gains for children with special needs in early literacy scores, but not in math scores. These…

Researchers studied components of a two-year school-wide Striving Readers intervention aimed at bolstering middle school teachers' use of literacy strategies to raise students' reading achievement. Although students of intervention teachers had significantly higher Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS) scores than students of non-participating…

This article examines how a second-grader demonstrates that reading is not about decoding letters and words in linear order but is a more complex activity involving the reader's decisions with respect to several aspects of their knowledge of their language and how comprehension is key to transacting with texts. The paper observes and documents the…

This Striving Readers evaluation examined the impact of a targeted intervention for struggling adolescent readers in participating schools. This study was conducted in nine high schools in nine school districts serving large percentages of at-risk students in Kentucky. The targeted intervention for struggling readers was the Kentucky Cognitive…

The author uses Bourdieu's concepts of field, capital, and habitus to analyze how students, parents, teachers, and administrators are responding to Georgia's test-based grade retention policy in reading at one Georgia elementary school. In this multiple case study, the author interviewed, observed, and collected documents regarding ten fifth…

While the importance of good teaching may be intuitively obvious, only over the past decade has education research begun to quantify the high economic stakes around teacher quality. In a world where the goals of national education systems are being transformed, from a focus on the transmission of facts and memorization to a focus on student…

J.C. Nalle is a Community School located in the Marshall Heights neighborhood of Ward 7 in Washington, D.C. The community in which J.C. Nalle is located, historically one of the more economically disadvantaged areas of the city, has experienced a number of changes in recent years. This report of evaluation findings begins with an introduction to…

ACT has been a leader in measuring college and career readiness trends since 1959. Each August, ACT releases The Condition of College & Career Readiness (www.act.org/newsroom/data/2015), an annual report on the progress of the ACT-tested graduating class relative to college readiness. Nationally, a record 59% of the 2015 graduating class took…

This report focuses on the opening of new school libraries and their impact on schools, teachers and students after two years of implementation of the Baltimore Elementary and Middle School Library Project (Library Project). The findings build on the first report of this project and show that it is not just new facilities, but also the added…

The Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) assessment is an international comparative study of reading skills of Grade Four learners. South Africa's first participation in the study took place in the 2006 cycle (Mullis "et al.", 2007), with repeat participation planned to take place for PIRLS 2011. PIRLS 2006 results…

Ensuring high academic achievement in schools with increasingly diverse students is a challenge. Assessing student engagement can be a powerful tool in predicting potential success and identifying students who may need additional support. Positive youth development theory supports focusing on a young person's strengths, and an asset-based approach…