This report focuses on the COVID-19 pandemic in the Kalamazoo Public Schools District in Kalamazoo, Michigan, which closed its doors to students from mid-March 2020 to June 2021. During this time, instruction transitioned from face-to-face to virtual, with students having three options for virtual instruction. In addition to individual KPS student…

Remediating student learning deficits in the area of reading is of the utmost importance, as the ability to read has a lifelong impact on learning. Schools and school districts are ranked on their ability to demonstrate growth in core areas of education, including reading. Although many programs, strategies, and remedies are extant for identifying…

Charter schools represent an increasingly important form of school choice in the United States. Charter schools are public schools, with a difference. Compared to traditional public schools, they are exempted from some of the state laws and regulations that govern traditional public schools. In this way, parents come to have a greater number of…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine the 7th grade reading performance among a random sample of urban public school academies (charter schools) in Wayne County, Michigan, compared with a random sample of traditional urban public schools within the same geographic area. This study was conducted using the fall 2012 Michigan…

The Middle-Grades Leadership Development (MLD) Project was designed to develop principal leaders and leadership teams who create high-performing middle-grades schools. Designed by the National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform, the four-year project was funded from 2013 to 2017 by a U.S. Department of Education Investing in Innovation (i3)…

Michigan has a problem. By several measures, the achievement of students attending its K-12 educational system has not kept pace with other states. Although Michigan's student achievement has improved over the past decade, the improvement has been modest, and achievement in many other states has easily surpassed that in Michigan. Furthermore,…

The What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) has updated its 2009 intervention report for SuccessMaker®, a set of computer-based courses designed to supplement regular K-8 reading instruction. The program is designed to improve skills in areas such as concepts of print, phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, grammar, and…

This article provides provide a new, systematic profile of more than 18,000 homeless students in Michigan, utilizing rich administrative data from all test-taking students in Grades 3-9 during three academic years. These data are part of a larger study of school choice and student mobility in that state. Homelessness is a condition found…

In school districts across the nation, diverse student groups, including English Learners and students with disabilities, have been experiencing significant gains in reading performance after using READ 180. This compendium of READ 180 research contains results of 40 studies conducted in a variety of settings, in school districts across the…

In the United States, approximately 65 percent of all jobs in 2020 will require some level of postsecondary education, and the demand will reach 70 percent in Michigan. This report seeks to inform public discourse on higher education by providing key performance indicators relevant to the goal of improving educational attainment for a healthy…

In the United States, approximately 65 percent of all jobs in 2020 will require some level of postsecondary education, and the demand will reach 68 percent in Iowa. This report seeks to inform public discourse on higher education by providing key performance indicators relevant to the goal of improving educational attainment for a healthy economy…

This randomized controlled study examines the effects of an intervention, Fusion Reading, on the reading achievement and motivation of adolescent struggling readers. Fusion Reading was implemented in grades 6 through 10 in four middle schools and three high schools from three districts in the southeast and western Michigan. Eligible struggling…

NAEP Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA) results in mathematics and reading are based on representative samples of 1,100 to 2,300 public school students at grade 4 and 900 to 2,100 public school students at grade 8 in each participating urban district in 2013. Twenty-one urban districts participated in the 2013 assessments. The assessments…

This study estimates the effect of one year of Fusion Reading implementation, a multistrategy intervention, builds on the work of the Strategic Instruction Model's Learning Strategies Curriculum and Xtreme Reading by integrating some of the same strategies (e.g., paraphrasing, visual imagery, and self-questioning for information acquisition;…

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), in partnership with the National Assessment Governing Board and the Council of the Great City Schools (CGCS), created the Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA) in 2002 to support the improvement of student achievement in the nation's large urban districts. The TUDA focuses attention on urban…