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…

Achievement gaps between immigrant and native students indicate failure to assure educational equity in the majority of countries assessed by the Programme for International Student Assessment in 2009 (PISA, 2009). The present article explains disparate achievement results in Europe, first testing the hypothesis of old and new democracies. In…

At some point in their child's education, many parents have considered whether it would be worth the expense to enrol their child in a private school. For parents, private schools may offer a particular kind of instruction that is not available in public schools. If private schools also attract higher-performing students and better teachers than…

Using quantile regression analyses, this study examines gender gaps in mathematics, science, and reading in Azerbaijan, Indonesia, Jordan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Qatar, Tunisia, and Turkey among 15 year-old students. The analyses show that girls in Azerbaijan achieve as well as boys in mathematics and science and overachieve in reading. In Jordan,…

The release of the latest results of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) garnered all the usual headlines about America's lackluster performance and the rise of competitor nations. To be sure, the findings--that America's fifteen-year-olds perform in the middle of the pack in both reading and math--are disconcerting for a…

"PISA 2009 at a Glance" is a companion publication to "PISA 2009 Results", the six-volume report on the 2009 survey conducted by the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). PISA assesses the extent to which students near the end of compulsory education have acquired some of the knowledge and skills that…

When Congress reauthorizes the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA), much of the debate will undoubtedly focus on the accountability requirements added to Title I by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB). Title I authorizes federal aid to school districts to educate low-achieving children in low-income areas. Among the most…

This paper is a response on the topic of school reform efforts being promoted by Bill Gates and other prominent education policy advocates. Last week, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates published an op-ed in the Washington Post, "How Teacher Development could Revolutionize our Schools," proposing that American public schools should do a…

The goal of this research was to investigate the effects of teacher read-alouds when students use, versus do not use, student companion texts during the read-alouds. Both quantitative and qualitative research data were collected based on an experimental design which randomly assigned 168 low SES, primarily Hispanic, students to either listen-only…

The purpose of this study is to examine the role of center-based care and children's school readiness in predicting their first and third grade reading and mathematics achievement. Predictions derived from an opportunity-propensity theoretical framework applied to data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Class of 1998-99. …

Public schools are faced with the ever-increasing pressure of maintaining a safe learning environment while continuously improving student performance. Also, there has been a growing concern among administrators and teachers for implementing an effective discipline plan that will keep students in class and engaged in learning as much as possible.…

The category of Specific Learning Disabilities (SLD) accounts for almost 50% of the students identified for special education services in America (U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education, 2010). The purpose of this study was to examine the extent to which the participating school system's (PSS) Special Education Procedural Guide…

This longitudinal quantitative study compared literacy achievement of students from second through sixth grade based on two organizational systems: graded (traditional) and nongraded (multiage) classrooms. The California Standards Test (CST) scaled and proficiency scores for English-Language Arts (ELA) were used as the study's independent variable…