This study seeks to share teachers' and principals' voices from middle schools in the Southeastern United States who are attempting to help their students achieve academic success. Obtaining a snapshot of middle schools in the Southeastern United States provides opportunities to recognize trends and identify challenges about the current…

For more than 100 years, education communities have debated how best to educate the young adolescent. Proponents of both the junior high school model and the current middle school model have advocated for a specialized approach to educating adolescents that emphasizes the developmental needs of students. To accomplish this, various organizational…

For years, policymakers, districts, and scholars have pushed for the inclusion of more Black male teachers in US public schools; however, their even smaller subset--Black male special education teachers--has been ignored, particularly by scholars. The results of this study provide insight into the recruitment and retention of Black male special…

Argumentation is an important component of scientific education (Osborne, 2010). However, how students create and evaluate competing arguments in scientific investigations is a complex construct, which presents significant challenges for assessment. We engaged 349 middle and high school students in a virtual scientific investigation based on an…

This technical appendix provides additional information about the sample, data, and estimation strategy used for a series of American Educator Panels (AEP) Data Notes published by the RAND Corporation in 2019. The Data Note series is intended to provide brief but incisive analyses of teacher and school leader survey results that may be of…

The Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) is a rapidly expanding network of public charter schools whose mission is to improve the education of low-income children. As of the 2012-2013 school year, 125 KIPP schools are in operation in 20 different states and the District of Columbia (DC). Ultimately, KIPP's goal is to prepare students to enroll and…

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…

We expect that word knowledge accumulates gradually. This article draws on earlier approaches to assessing depth, but focuses on one dimension: richness of semantic knowledge. We present results from a study in which three distinct item types were developed at three levels of depth: knowledge of common usage patterns, knowledge of broad topical…

This report provides a new resource for understanding the state of urban public schools in the U.S. Geared specifically toward city leaders who want to evaluate how well traditional district and charter schools are serving all their city's children and how their schools compare to those in other cities, the report measures outcomes for all public…

This study explored the impact of using best practices identified in previous studies in designing age-appropriate websites for middle and high school youth. Utilizing a mixed-method approach, 31 middle and 22 high school youth took part in six focus groups across four states. Participants were introduced to a website specifically designed for…

This latest brief updates education leaders on the key policies the 13 (Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia) Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) states plan to implement under federal waivers to No Child Left Behind. It details,…

Recent scores on state tests show that middle grades students have made some progress in meeting their state's academic standards over the last half-decade. Yet a closer look at state standards indicates that too many Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) states have set them too low. Quite a few states have taken steps to improve their…

The purposes of this study were to determine whether variables reported in previous research on teacher turnover could be reduced to a number of factors, and to determine how those resulting factors affected career longevity in band directors. Career longevity was defined as the total number of years teaching. Literature on teacher turnover was…

Nearly 7,000 students drop out of the nation's public high schools each school day, and 3,000 of them are in the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) states. Altogether, an estimated 1.3 million teenagers in the United States abandon high school each year without earning a diploma. In 1,700 of the nation's high schools, less than 60 percent of…

Nearly all Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) states have a state-sponsored virtual school, and the remaining states are either planning or beginning initial implementation. Just 12 years ago, none of the 50 states used the Web to provide courses to middle grades or high school students. By 2000, several SREB states, including Florida,…