The purpose of this study was to find a way to increase low literacy skills for 5th- grade students in a charter school. The research explored the relationship between the attitudes, behaviors, standardized test scores, and perceptions related to student reading; parents' attitudes and perceptions related to their student's reading; and teachers'…

Closing the achievement gap has been a continuous topic of conversation in the United States for decades. School leaders have explored many ways to address the academic achievement of their marginalized student population. One approach has been the implementation of culturally relevant pedagogy and curriculum. By implementing a curriculum in which…

Examining school-wide factors that can positively influence student and school success is especially crucial after the COVID-19 pandemic, which resulted in a period of online learning that led to a decrease in student achievement scores across the nation. As a result, this study sought to assess how schedule design specifically affected teacher…

This third of six briefs analyzing data from the U.S. Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), covering the 2020-21 school year, explores the educational settings where students with disabilities spend their time. As was the case in the analysis of the previous CRDC covering the 2018-19 school year, students with disabilities spend more time in…

This final of six briefs analyzing data from the U.S. Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), covering the 2020-21 school year, explores the characteristics of the 176 charter schools with a specific focus on students with disabilities. This group, representing 2.3% of charter schools nationwide, is heavily concentrated in a handful of states and is…

When refugees are forced to flee their country, they leave for a number of reasons. Some refugees resettle in the United States, in Buffalo, New York. Buffalo is home to a large number of Burmese refugees over the years and some of those refugees are children. Schools can play an important role in children's lives and school administrators can…

I investigate longitudinal preferences for schools revealed by families' applications to middle and high schools within a large urban school district's universal enrollment system. I find that preferences for schools' racial/ethnic composition are more stable than preferences for quality and proximity to home, even after concurrently controlling…

Educators and researchers have been fighting the reading wars for the last century, with battles see-sawing literacy instruction in American schools from phonics to whole language and, most recently, back to phonics again. Over the last decade, 32 states and the District of Columbia have adopted new "science of reading" laws that require…

Educators in a rural charter middle school in the United States were challenged with the reliable assessment of student thinking skills even though the development of higher order thinking was an espoused goal for the school. The purpose of this study was to validate a new rubric based on Bloom's Revised Taxonomy (BRT) to reliably assess student…

The Kauffman School is a public, tuition-free charter school serving Kansas City students. In the 2018-19 school year, the school enrolled 1,127 students in grades 5 through 12. Most (89 percent) of the students were low income, and 89 percent were Black or Hispanic. This report evaluates the impact of the Kauffman School on student college…

Critical consciousness refers to the ability to analyze and take action against oppressive social forces shaping society. This longitudinal, mixed methods study compared the critical consciousness development of adolescents of color (n = 453) attending two sets of high schools featuring schooling models that represent "opposing"…

Background/Context: In thousands of classrooms throughout the United States and internationally, behavior management apps have become an integral part of schools' discipline machineries. Such apps are designed to help teachers enforce rules, especially when it comes to rewards and punishments within school token economies. To understand how these…

The opportunity gap continues to widen in the U.S. education setting due to the ever-growing diversification of student populations resulting in part from increasing numbers of BIPOC students in schools. Meanwhile, most educators continue to be White middle-class females. In this study, fourth- and fifth-grade students at a K-8 charter school were…

This report summarizes the results of kindergarten through fifth grade students' academic achievement outcomes in mathematics and science following four years of campus-level participation in the Launching Elementary Academic Foundations (LEAF) to STEM program. The LEAF to STEM Program consists of three key components that were adapted for K-5…

Educational technology is evolving and growing at a faster pace than ever before. Such fast-paced growth makes it difficult to evaluate and measure its effectiveness in a timely manner and creates a need for independent academic literature in this area. This study serves to address to this need and contribute to the body of literature. The intent…