The purpose of this qualitative study is to determine how four rural school districts in East Tennessee worked to implement the third-grade retention law within their understanding and interpretation of the law to the benefit of the students and overall communities they serve. The study used a semi-structured questionnaire format conducted with a…

School context can shape relative intervention response in myriad ways due to factors, such as instructional quality, resource allocation, peer effects, and correlations between the school context and characteristics of enrolled students (e.g., higher-poverty students attending higher-poverty schools). In the current study, we used data from…

When observing and consistently hearing about the obstacles our current public educational system faces, many are left wondering what can be done to produce genuine, significant, and continuous improvement. Upon deeper analysis of educational systems, one can see that many areas need system improvement. SOAR School (pseudonym) is a Pre-K-5 school…

The Ready for School, Ready for Life initiative in Guilford County, North Carolina, aims to support interconnected programs and services for young children and their families with the goal of having children enter kindergarten ready for learning. The initiative aims to strengthen connections among existing programs in Guilford County and provide…

The aim of this study was to examine the impact of Reading for Ethiopia's Achievement Developed Community Outreach (READ CO) project intervention on students' oral reading fluency, reading comprehension, academic achievements, and listening comprehension. It also aimed at identifying the students and teachers' awareness and practices about the…

There is a wide gap between what research evidence identifies as effective reading intervention and what is currently offered in schools. This effectiveness study reports the results of a long-term research/school system partnership that is implementing reading intervention for children with reading difficulties in Canadian community schools. In…

Egypt has long promised quality basic education. Nevertheless, international and national assessments show poor reading skills. Community schools (CS) are a component of Egypt's Education for All strategy. CS were intended to offer quality education to children who otherwise would have no chance to complete primary school. Previous studies report…

Parent, school, and community engagement is widely established as a collaborative strategy to improve the school experience and educational outcomes for children and youth (Epstein & Sanders, 2006; SEDL, 2013; Weiss, Lopez, & Rosenberg, 2011; Barr & Saltmarsh, 2014). Consistent with this viewpoint, the Houston Independent School…

The Big Lift is a collective impact initiative extending from preschool to third grade in San Mateo County, California. The collective impact effort consists of people and organizations from various sectors uniting to tackle a single, complicated societal problem -- in this case, third grade reading achievement. The initiative is a partnership of…

African American male third graders in U.S Title I schools frequently fail to read on grade level. However, in three Title I schools in East Texas, this demographic demonstrated exceptionally high reading ability. This explanatory case study investigated the instructional strategies and practices linked to high reading achievement for these…

This paper evaluates potential benefits of the community schools model. The sample consists of 20 Community Schools and 40 comparison schools. Data were obtained from the 2013 Illinois School Report Cards, including demographics, and grade-level ISAT scores by gender and subject. A matched sampling method was used to control for student…

This study explored outcomes related to students' participation in a Houston Symphony (HS) partnership at a targeted HISD elementary school. Students received weekly in-school core enrichment instruction and after-school violin instruction by Houston Symphony Community-Embedded Musicians throughout the 2018-2019 academic year. The study found that…

In 1 urban Tennessee school, students in Grades 3 through 5 had not met adequate yearly progress in reading for the past 5 years. The purpose of this case study was to explore teachers' perceptions of current district-recommended teaching practice in reading. The research questions related to current instructional strategies, teaching practices,…

The "National Board for Professional Teaching Standards" ("NBPTS") establishes standards for accomplished teachers and awards professional certification to teachers who can demonstrate that their teaching practices meet those standards. Educators and experts in child development and related fields established the organization,…

A group of elementary school reading teachers used their time in a Professional Learning Community to develop a systematic intervention to address the needs of struggling readers in grades 3 to 5. Working as a team, they identified a collection of books that was culturally diverse, high interest, appealing to boys and girls, aligned with…