The Texas Education Agency (TEA) has implemented a student accountability system that measures students' performance on the State of Texas Assessment for Academic Readiness (STAAR) in several content areas. Therefore, teachers and administrators all over the state are always seeking ways to ensure that students are academically well prepared.…

Summer programming is one of the main ways school districts have sought to help students recover academically from COVID-19 pandemic-related setbacks. Authors use a survey administered to a nationally representative sample of kindergarten through grade 12 public school districts to investigate the prevalence and structure of districts' programming…

Conducted for Arnold Ventures by Abt Associates, the "New Mexico Charter School Study: Findings Report" collates the results of Abt's evaluation of numerous charter schools in the state, several of which employ a whole-school dual language model. The study also created multiple logic models for use by practitioners, policymakers, and…

The pandemic affected the lives and social-emotional experiences of every student to some extent. Along with the unprecedented closures of schools across the country in March 2020, virtually all social activities ceased. Students were cut off from their teachers, with uneven access to live instruction and hands-on, collaborative learning. There…

Educators and students in schools across the United States have faced sweeping, unprecedented changes to teaching and learning as a result of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, which shuttered school buildings in spring 2020. This Data Note offers teachers' and principals' perspectives on some of those changes and presents their…

This paper looks at how emotions in the field move from one context to another and between individuals, and how they change forms in an arctic Finnish village school. During the fieldwork, non-verbalized emotions influenced the events in the field and also penetrated the research. The paper asks how these non-verbalized emotions can be addressed…

To support rural postsecondary students' college access and completion, researchers, policy makers, and educators need a more comprehensive understanding of their demographic characteristics and financial needs, especially compared to nonrural students. Previous rural-nonrural analyses have not disaggregated students by degree type (bachelor's,…

Equipping youth with and without disabilities for the world of work has been the focus of ongoing legislative and policy initiatives. The authors examined the extent to which career development and vocational activities were available to and accessed by youth with severe disabilities or emotional and behavioral disorders attending 34 urban,…

Purpose: The overall purpose of this exploratory research was to better understand rural educators' feelings about school-based sex education in order to foster better communication and collaboration between prevention researchers and rural teachers and administrators. In order to accomplish this purpose, the research question asked "How does…

Describes a case study of a rural school district in which conflicting superintendent, school board, and community values led to the superintendent's dismissal, which led to the defeat of the board members. Analyzes the course of events in terms of the dissatisfaction theory of democracy. (FMW)

According to the annual industry report in "Training" magazine, money spent on employee training dropped approximately six percent--the first time that training expenditures have dropped since the mid 1990's. At the same time, web-based training increased from 48% of all computer-based training to 61% in just one year (2002-2003). The…

Using identified factors that affect students' musical outcomes, this research study examined how instrumental music students attending "good" rural Appalachian high schools compared to other instrumental students. "Good" refers to those 12 Appalachian rural school districts identified as the best out of 46 rural county school…

A four-year project compared how teachers, students, and parents perceived the climate of the secondary schools in Greenfield, Massachusetts, through responses to eight value statements about the purposes of school. Data suggested students felt more positive than parents or teachers about the school's ability to prepare them for later life. (NEC)

Reports on a 1983-84 nationwide descriptive study of K-12 and one-12 rural school districts enrolling 300 students or less done to provide educators with needed information on the status of the very small school district. Highlights findings on rural districts, superintendents, teachers, student performance, and school programs. (BRR)

Twenty-five rural educators completed a 12-item Q-sort on stress factors. Resolving parent/school conflicts was the most stressful, followed by handling student discipline, and completing reports on time. The stressors varied somewhat from stressors listed by urban teachers, but only slightly. (BRR)