The feeling of voicelessness creates a sense of internalized powerlessness for students in their schooling and preparation for learning and success. The San Joaquin Valley is surrounded by farms as well as correctional institutions and service industries. Each of these industries is interconnected with students' lives, with some having family…

In March 2020, most schools in the U.S. transitioned to distance learning. During the transition a significant number of students did not fully engage in learning opportunities. This brief uses administrative panel data from the CORE Districts in California to approximate the impact of the pandemic by analyzing how absenteeism has affected student…

Seventh- and 8th-grade students in a within-teacher randomized control study read from visual-syntactic formatted text for 44 min per week over the course of 1 year. On the annual state assessment, we found small statistically significant improvements on the overall English Language Arts scaled score (ES = 0.05, p < 0.05) and the writing…

Background: Classroom discourse featuring meaning making supports students achieving discipline-specific learning. However, moving beyond recitation requires developing beliefs, skills, structures, and practices. Any theorizing we do about developing discussion practice must attend to realities of culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms.…

This quantitative study investigated the learning outcomes of students with disabilities in comparison to their non-disabled peers in a TK-12th grade school that offers a sixth-twelfth grade virtual public charter school program that currently serves students in the state of California. No differences were found between groups indicating…

This study estimates the causal impact of 8th grade English learner (EL) reclassification on high school English language arts (ELA) standardized test scores, SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) reading, and on-track to graduate status. I apply a regression discontinuity design to rich administrative data from a large district in California. The…

Few studies have considered academic vocabulary interventions for students who have learning disabilities (LD) and also are English Learners (EL). This research explored the effects of the third year of the CHAAOS (Creating Habits that Accelerate the Academic Language of Students) vocabulary intervention for eighth grade students who received…

This article compares developmental kindergartens of the past to current academic kindergartens through the voices of kindergarten teachers who taught in both types. Data were obtained from interviews of ten public school kindergarten teachers from California with experience in kindergarten ranging 18-34 years (M = 24). Teachers indicated that…

In 2010, California adopted the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for math and English. The new standards are part of a state effort to prepare students for college and careers in the 21st-century global economy and narrow longstanding achievement gaps. The state's implementation is complete, but because districts decide whether and when they…

Despite the widespread popularity of both Dual Language Programs (DLP) and charter schools in California, little is known about the intersection of these two school models. In a quantitative study utilizing several statewide databases, researchers explored four questions related to DLP and charter schools: 1) How many Latina/x/o students attend…

A growing number of educators concur that, in order to improve student academic performance, schools need to focus not only on students' academic needs but also on their social, emotional, and material needs (Piscatelli & Lee, 2011). As a result, school climate--the social, emotional, and physical characteristics of a school community (Cohen,…

This report is the first in a series of five reports considering career-readiness features within high school assessments. Utilizing feature analysis and cognitive lab interviews, the primary objective of this study was to verify and validate the existence of specific career-readiness features in select math and English language arts (ELA) test…

This brief applies value-added models to student surveys in the CORE Districts to explore whether social-emotional learning (SEL) surveys can be used to measure effective classroom-level supports for SEL. The authors find that classrooms differ in their effect on students' growth in self-reported SEL--even after accounting for school-level…

The driving question for this brief is based on the most common question that teachers, principals, school leaders, coaches, and grant writers ask the Buck Institute for Education (BIE) about Project Based Learning (PBL): What evidence exists that shows the impact of Project Based Learning on student learning in core content areas? Research shows…

In this multi-year study, we taught English/Language Arts teachers of students with learning disabilities in middle school to incorporate 15 min of daily vocabulary activities with students in their intact special education English/Language Arts classes. During Year 1, teachers taught 48 words to their sixth grade students, who learned and…