"12 for Life" is an Investing in Innovation (i3) development grant funded by the Office of Innovation and Improvement, U.S. Department of Education. "12 for Life" provides a rigorous STEM curriculum, combined with on-the-job-training, work/life skills development, mentoring, and employment opportunities to high school students…

The Success Boston initiative was launched in 2008 to improve Boston public high school graduates' access to and success in college, particularly for members of underrepresented groups. This report summarizes results from the second of three reports examining the classes of 2013 and 2014 and examines whether and how coaching affects students'…

Reading achievement scores for adolescents with disabilities are markedly lower than the scores of adolescents without disabilities. For example, 62% of students with disabilities read "below" the basic level on the NAEP Reading assessment, compared to 19% of their nondisabled peers. This achievement gap has been a continuing challenge…

With support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, researchers and experts in mathematics education developed the Mathematics Design Collaborative (MDC) as a strategy to support the transition to Common Core State Standards in math. MDC provides short formative assessment lessons known as Classroom Challenges for use in middle and high…

Ninth Grade Academies (NGAs)--also called Freshman Academies--have attracted national attention as a particularly intensive and promising approach for supporting a successful transition for high school freshmen. An NGA is a self-contained learning community for ninth-graders that operates as a school within a school. NGAs have four core structural…

Learning communities are a high impact activity that can influence students' likelihood for success. Colorado State University (CSU) created the Key Communities (Key) program, which is open to all students but targets students that have persistently lower graduation and retention rates. The majority of Key students are under-represented…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the impact of Achieve3000, a differentiated online literacy curriculum, on students' scores on the California State Test (CST). In the 2011-12 school year, 1,957 students in Chula Vista began using Achieve3000's solutions in 3rd through 8th grade. Using a form of propensity score matching called Inverse…

The Schools to Watch: School Transformation Network Project is a whole school reform model designed to improve the educational practices, experiences, and outcomes of low-performing middle-grades schools. Developed by the National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform, the four-year project was funded in 2010 by a U.S. Department of Education…

States and school districts are searching for strategies to raise the college and career readiness of high school graduates--imperative in an era when postsecondary credentials are the key to good jobs, better pay, and stronger economies. The creation and implementation of higher graduation standards aligned to college and career expectations is…

With funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, CRESST conducted a multi-year evaluation of a major school reform project at Alain Leroy Locke High School, historically one of California's lowest performing secondary schools. Beginning in 2007, Locke High School transitioned into a set of smaller, Green Dot Charter High Schools,…

These two recipients of this year's Alan C. Purves Award reflect on their work (reported in "RTE" Vol. 41, No. 3, pp. 269-303) on "A Cognitive Strategies Approach to Reading and Writing Instruction for English Language Learners in Secondary School" and the lessons they learned from their original research study as they tried to…