NIET [National Institute for Excellence in Teaching] continually evaluates the impact of TAP: The System for Teacher and Student Advancement on raising student achievement, improving instruction and increasing the ability of high-need schools to recruit, retain and support effective teachers. In addition to national results in student achievement…

One of the modifications of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (known as the No Child Left Behind Act) gave parents of low-income students in low-performing schools a choice of Supplemental Educational Services (SEdS). SEdS include tutoring or other academic support services offered outside the regular school day, at no charge to students…

Avenue Community Development Corporation (Avenue CDC) saw the necessity of increasing parent engagement while fostering leadership development in Houston's Northside community. The primary goals of Avenue CDC's Family Leadership Program are to actively engage parents in their children's education at all grade levels and foster strong relationships…

The major purpose of this study was to find out how to encourage Title I family engagement as the school funds were decreasing in the next school year. I wanted to determine how to continue, as well as increase, parental engagement at a Title I elementary school in a rural setting. The Title I program focuses on assisting students who are…

The 2013 study, "The Effectiveness of Secondary Math Teachers from Teach for America and the Teaching Fellows Programs," examined whether students taught by teachers in the "Teach for America" ("TFA") and "The New Teacher Project Teaching Fellows" ("Teaching Fellows") programs had greater…

The 2013 study, "The Effectiveness of Secondary Math Teachers from Teach for America and the Teaching Fellows Programs," examined whether students taught by teachers in the "Teach for America" ("TFA") and "The New Teacher Project Teaching Fellows" ("Teaching Fellows") programs had greater…

This applied dissertation was designed to provide perceptual teacher data as well as summative testing data to educational leaders concerning the effects of implementing Investigations in Number, Data, and Space® (Investigations) in three Title I elementary school settings, two Title I schools, and one non-Title I school. Data collected during…

This report takes a closer look at not just student learning, but also the quality of school conditions that support that learning. There, too, Michigan has troubling weak spots. The state currently ranks 42nd of 47 for funding equity, meaning Michigan has some of the biggest gaps in resources between high-poverty and low-poverty school districts.…

Coaching for urban early career teachers (ECTs) offers promise and aligns with features of effective professional development to support the implementation of evidence-based practices. However, the functional components and key elements of coaching and coach supervision are not well specified in the literature. The goal of the current study was to…

This paper draws from a large longitudinal study into issues related to student retention beyond the compulsory years of schooling and gives voice to a commonly-overlooked set of stakeholders, namely those in the community. Although many studies report on students' and teachers' opinions of the influence of the community on student engagement and…

Background/Context: Student teaching represents a critical component of most teacher education programs. However, there is significant variation both in the contextual factors that preservice teachers (PSTs) encounter in their field placements and in the ways that teacher educators mediate PSTs' learning in relation to those placements. In…

Students in urban under-resourced schools are often disengaged from the curriculum. Distributing voice (agency) to them would seem an obvious counter to their alienation, allowing them to be co-constructors rather than objects of their education. Beyond being pragmatically sound, student agency is, arguably, a psychological and moral imperative.…

This dissertation consists of three essays. The first essay investigates the feasibility of moving high-performing teachers to low-performing schools using administrative micro data from Missouri. I define teacher labor markets concentrically and construct models to allow teachers' local labor markets, within teaching, to influence their mobility…

What makes a Title I school high-achieving, and what can we all learn from that experience? Professional learning and leadership that supports personalized instruction makes the difference, as captured in the ground-breaking research of authors Sonia Caus Gleason and Nancy Gerzon. This illuminating book shows how four outstanding schools are…

This essay is an exploratory history of American educators as viewed through the lens of disability studies. By this the author means that she is looking at the history of school teachers with disability as the primary marker of social relations, in much the same way that she and others have looked at the history of education through the primary…