While adolescent foundational skills interventions can be critical levers for reading improvement, district leaders, teachers, and researchers must make complex decisions about how to evaluate their effectiveness in context. In this discussion article, we explore three issues and tensions we experienced during a 2-year research-practice…

To resolve the graduation gap among Black and Hispanic students in Central Florida, the development of equity-centered practices to improve high school graduation rates is essential. The purpose of this study was to determine the impact of incorporating methods such as the self achievement theory, self-determination methodology, and equity…

The recent changes to school accountability under the "Every Student Succeeds Act" (2015) have highlighted the negative effects of chronic absenteeism on student achievement. For many students, poor attendance habits begin as early as kindergarten and continue through high school. Resulting in literacy and math gaps, the impacts of…

Black students remain under enrolled in AP courses compared to White peers, even with intentional outreach. One possible reason for this continued disparity is that Black students may choose not to enroll in AP courses where they are racially isolated. Using the 2017-2018 Civil Rights Data Collection and multilevel modeling, I examine the…

Descriptive evidence shows that English learners (ELs) have lower high school graduation and 4-year-college attendance rates than monolingual and fluent English users. Applying the regression discontinuity design to rich administrative data from a large district in California, this study identifies the first causal effects of initial EL…

English learners (ELs) in Florida face numerous challenges including low test scores, and high dropout rates, and are typically several years behind their peers when compared to other states. The purpose of this quantitative quasi-experimental ex-post-facto study was to compare the differences between ACCESS 2.0 scores of high school ELs in…

In 2009 President Barack Obama signed into law the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (Dragoset, et al., 2017). The Recovery Act served as the financial umbrella which helped to allocate $3 billion to fund School Improvement Grants to support states and school districts in championing original, innovative programs as well as to hire staff to…

In 2013, California implemented an ambitious school funding reform, the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF), which allocates state funding by the proportion of unduplicated "high-need" students in the district: those from low-income families, English learners, and those in foster care. The goal of LCFF was to reduce academic achievement…

In 2013, California implemented an ambitious school funding reform, the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF), which allocates state funding by the proportion of unduplicated "high-need" students in the district: those from low-income families, English learners, and those in foster care. Using student-level longitudinal data for all…

This is the executive summary for the report, "A Teacher Who Looks Like Me: Examining Racial Diversity in Wisconsin's Teacher Workforce and the Student-to-Teacher Pipeline." Among the most urgent challenges confronting Wisconsin's K-12 education system are long-standing disparities in educational opportunity and achievement on the basis…

Even though school systems throughout the United States have developed a variety of programs to decrease the achievement gap between underrepresented groups and students classified as members of the majority group, data regarding their effectiveness are either scarce or inconclusive. Some research suggests an increasing number of public-school…

Classroom teachers struggle to meet the needs of all students as the United States population continues to become more diverse. While preservice teacher training programs strive to provide teachers with the knowledge and skills to complete this task effectively, opportunity gaps between minority students and their peers continue to grow. Through…

The issue that this study addressed is the evaluation of the impact of Imagine Math© upon the closure of learning gaps of English Learners and students of diverse racial backgrounds in mathematics and Algebra. Specifically, the intent of the research was to determine the impact of the adaptive learning program, Imagine Math©, upon student…

Ethnoracial inequality in educational achievement and attainment is a long-standing feature of the American education system. For example, national reading assessments show that White fourth graders scored nearly a standard deviation higher than Black or Hispanic students on average in 2015 (NCES, 2015). The measurement and analysis of differences…

We draw on novel district-level test score data to describe novel approaches for measuring ethnoracial achievement gaps and assessing trends toward achievement equity from 2009 to 2016. Using SEDA data, we estimate gap trends for each grade over time in each district. We measure trends in both within-district gaps--comparing Black or Hispanic to…