Nationally, millions of students in grades 7-12 are at risk of dropping out of high school because of low literacy skills, poor attendance, and class failure. The absence of a college- and career-ready education for these students is a civil rights and social justice issue that the federal government cannot ignore. Unfortunately, many of these…

The Maryland School Assessment (MSA) is administered annually to students in grades 3-8 in reading and math. MSA data are used to meet federal No Child Let Behind (NCLB) requirements. This paper presents how Maryland students' reading and mathematics MSA scores continued to improve in 2009, and the achievement gaps among special services and…

This appendix focuses on the descriptive statistics of the middle study schools that participated in the "Gaining Ground in the Middle Grades: Why Some Schools Do Better. A Large-Scale Study of Middle Grades Practices and Student Outcomes. Initial Research." This appendix contains the following figures: (1) Student…

This paper presents the research and methodology and analyses used for the "Gaining Ground in the Middle Grades" research. This appendix contains the following sections: (1) Overview; (2) Constructing the Survey Data File; (3) Constructing Composite Independent Variables (Subdomains); (4) Constructing Longitudinal Outcome Variables; (5)…