Previous research has suggested that African American children are more equipped to close the achievement gap when enrolled in mainstream schools than in culturally familiar schools. However, this study seeks to determine if there are benefits to attending a culturally familiar school. This study explored test score performance difference of 393…

Federal accountability policy mandates that states administer standardized tests beginning in third grade. In turn, third-grade test scores are often viewed as a key indicator in policy and practice. Yet literacy struggles begin well before third grade, as do racial and socioeconomic disparities in children's literacy skills. Kindergarten…

This study leverages six years of public prekindergarten (pre-K) and kindergarten data (N = 22,469) from the Boston Public Schools (BPS) to examine enrollment in BPS pre-K from 2012-2017 for students from different racial/ethnic, socioeconomic, and linguistic groups. The largest differences in enrollment emerged with respect to race and…

The topic for this dissertation was the effects arts have on standardized test scores of math. The research problem compared the students who had fine arts integrated into the curriculum and those that did not. This study included six target schools that have primarily African American students. The six-city schools studied were the third through…

The academic achievement gap is the educational separation on standardized tests between students in low socioeconomic and high socioeconomic areas. The purpose of this study was to research academic variables that could impact the achievement gap for African American students by studying third grade literacy practices of Caucasian American and…

The purpose of the study was to examine the impact of the Bellarmine Literacy Project (BLP) on Kentucky Performance Rating Educational Progress (K-PREP) literacy scores, school behavior referrals, and suspensions for third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade African-American males. The study was designed to determine if the BLP improved student learning,…

The purpose of this quantitative causal-comparative study was to evaluate the long-term effects of Florida's Third-Grade Retention policy on low performing students' subsequent academic performance as measured by FCAT reading scores. The study included a random stratified sample of 1500 retained third graders for failure to meet Florida's…

African American and other students of color have continued to score lower than White students in many classrooms and on achievement tests in every subject, especially in reading. The purpose of this study was to explore if there is a relationship between a teacher's cultural responsiveness and their third grade African American students'…

The 2001 authorization of the No Child Left Behind Act and its standards and accountability requirements generated interest among state education agencies in Florida, Mississippi, and North Carolina, which are served by the Regional Educational Laboratory Southeast, in monitoring changes in student reading and math proficiency at the school level.…

I use standardized test scores from roughly 45 million students to describe the temporal structure of educational opportunity in over 11,000 school districts--almost every district in the US. For each school district, I construct two measures: the average academic performance of students in grade 3 and the within-cohort growth in test scores from…

Students of color are underrepresented in gifted programs relative to White students, but the reasons for this underrepresentation are poorly understood. We investigate the predictors of gifted assignment using nationally representative, longitudinal data on elementary students. We document that even among students with high standardized test…

This longitudinal study examined the outcomes of Project Excite on reducing minority students' achievement gaps in STEM over 14 years. Project Excite was designed to provide intensive supplemental enrichment and accelerated programming for high-potential, underrepresented minority students from third through eighth grades to better prepare them…

We apply a quantile version of the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition to estimate the counterfactual distribution of the test scores of Black students. In the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998-1999 (ECLS-K), we find that the gap initially appears only at the top of the distribution of test scores. As children age, however,…

This article highlights the complexity of becoming a reader in public school classrooms, by describing the ways students' reading bodies constituted the sites and discursive means for the performance of diverse reader identities. Drawing on sociocultural literacy and post-structural performance theories to suggest the notion of embodied…

This study provides a critical look at achievement of African American (AA), and Latino (L) females in third and fifth grades on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) in reading, mathematics and science. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the 2007 and 2011 TAKS raw data. Data analyses indicate that AAL females had the lowest…