The purpose of this quantitative ex post facto study was to examine the differences that exist in academic outcomes between mobile and non-mobile middle-school students at a school district in Northeastern New Jersey. Students are considered mobile if they voluntarily change schools, whereas non-mobile students do not experience such transitions.…

Uncommon Schools is a nonprofit charter management organization that starts and manages public charter schools, primarily in traditionally underserved communities. As part of a 2016 grant awarded to Uncommon from the U.S. Department of Education's Charter Schools Program to support replication and expansion of its school model, we conducted a…

This quantitative study is primarily intended to examine whether district level performance results from Grade 8 ELA state assessments can help to predict future passing rates on AP exams. The participants for the study are all 218 K-12 school districts in New Jersey, all of which generated results across score levels and passing rates for PARCC…

Critical thinkers and proficient readers use a composite of similar cognitive skills that are challenging to assess and difficult to cultivate. Therefore, students and teachers require an instructional model that demonstrates the acuity involved in these proficiencies. This quasiexperimental study aimed to investigate the impact of Equalities as…

Interim assessments have been defined variously in different contexts and can be used for predictive purposes or instructional purposes. In this paper, we present results from a study where we evaluated reporting needs for interim assessments designed for instructional purposes and intended to be used at the end of defined curriculum units.…

In this quantitative study, public charter schools were compared to traditional public schools in New Jersey in their academic achievement on the statewide standardized tests. These schools' academic achievements are assessed based on their students' proficiency and growth scores in English Language Arts/Literacy and Mathematics in grades 4-7.…

This paper examines the impact of increasing teacher salaries on student outcomes by exploiting variation from the "50K The First Day" campaign that established a $50K salary floor for new teachers across New Jersey school districts. Using school-level data from 2003 to 2019, we employ a staggered difference-in-differences (DiD) approach…

Some states require physical education (PE) to be in a school's curriculum. Some people feel that it is a time to play and it is not an important subject in a school's curriculum. This study aims to shed light on the potential effects of PE on students' performance in language arts as subject matter. The purpose of this study was to examine the…

There is currently much conversation on the issue of the achievement gap as scholars, politicians, and educational leaders continue to grapple with educational inequity and underperformance of students in urban neighborhoods who are mostly Black and Latinx as compared with higher performing students, mostly white, in suburban neighborhoods. This…

This single instrument case study illuminates the aesthetic transactions an adolescent male student constructs in response to an experimental Gothic studies reading unit implemented by his cooperating teacher over a sixth month period in his seventh grade ELA (English/ Language Arts) class. Ray is described as ''lazy' regarding academic reading…

This study will examine and review the effectiveness of having a special education, resource teacher present in the classroom during Mathematics and Language Arts Literacy. In the state of New Jersey, students are issued a state assessment in the content area of Mathematics and Language Arts Literacy, and having a resource teacher present for…

Roaring Falls Unified School District (a pseudonym), an urban New Jersey district near NYC, was challenged by K-8 Multilingual Language Learners (MLLs) who lagged significantly behind general education students in English Language Arts (ELA). The District had roughly 12,000 students, of whom 93.0% were Hispanic, 26.2% were MLLs, and 32.0% were…

The purpose of this study was to assess the effectiveness of Uncommon Schools in a turnaround setting. Uncommon was awarded a 2016 grant from the U.S. Department of Education's Investing in Innovation Fund (i3) to support TurnNJ, a project intended to support Uncommon's whole-school turnaround efforts in Camden and Newark, New Jersey. The study…

The purpose of this study was to examine relationships between six school climate proxies included in the 2015-2016 New Jersey School Performance Report (SPR) and median school growth percentiles in English language arts and math, and to assess the predictive value of these proxies on academic growth. I collected and analyzed data from the SPR for…

The significance of social and emotional learning (SEL) continues to grow in today's schools around the world. More teachers agree that students' social and emotional needs must be addressed in the learning process. This is because how students feel about themselves and think about one another affects the ways they learn in school. Learning…