Promoting Adolescents' Comprehension of Text (PACT) is a text- and discourse-based set of instructional practices that engage students with disciplinary texts as a means of building content knowledge and improving reading comprehension. PACT)s "efficacy" has been the subject of extensive previous trials. The purpose of this study was to…

Academic achievement in the nation's lowest performing schools is troubling. Despite improvements in students' overall academic achievement over the past few decades, proficiency gaps in reading and mathematics remain across income, racial, and ethnic groups. One promising strategy for reducing achievement gaps is to expand the school day, often…

Utilizing longitudinal data from the national Schools to Watch (STW) program, this paper examines school demographic characteristics and teacher ratings of the implementation of STW criteria in STW schools and schools that have applied but have not yet been designated as a STW. The STW program was established by the National Forum to Accelerate…

This study looks deeply inside 17 schools that stand at the vanguard of the current revolution in teaching. This new National Center on Time & Learning (NCTL) report reveals the substantive ways in which these schools are providing their teachers with more time to reflect on, develop, and hone their craft, by very explicitly leveraging an…

This study reports on a critical review of the language demands contained in the Common Core State Standards for English language arts (CCSS-ELA) with the aim of deriving important implications for the instruction of English language learners. The language demands of the CCSS-ELA were compared with those of existing English language arts (ELA) and…

Charter schools represent an increasingly important form of school choice in the United States. Charter schools are public schools, with a difference. Compared to traditional public schools, they are exempted from some of the state laws and regulations that govern traditional public schools. In this way, parents come to have a greater number of…

Quad Blogging was implemented to connect students beyond classroom walls to explore social issues. Four middle school classrooms in New Jersey, Vermont, California and Qatar served as the research sites. Students engaged in collaborative inquiry around social issues, identifying a social issue specific to their context. Final products included…

The Afterschool Alliance, in partnership with MetLife Foundation, is proud to present the first in their latest series of four issue briefs examining critical issues facing middle school youth and the vital role afterschool programs play in addressing these issues. This series explores afterschool and: the Common Core State Standards, students…

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…

The Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) charter schools' consistently positive impacts on student achievement (detailed in Volume I of this report) have prompted efforts to scale up the KIPP model to serve more students. According to the KIPP model, highly qualified and autonomous principals, supported by national and regional staff, drive the…

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…

In this study, we identified 10 sexuality education programmes from different locations in the USA that aim to give young people knowledge and skills to develop healthy relationships, as well as avoid pregnancy and disease. We conducted in-depth interviews with programme administrators to develop a series of case studies and provide concrete…

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 article reports on two studies using "Language Muse[superscript SM]" (LM), a web-based, teacher professional development (TPD) application designed to enhance teachers' linguistic awareness and to support teachers in the development of language-based instructional scaffolding for English language learners (ELL). In Study 1,…

"The Right Trajectory" brings to the forefront an often-overlooked voice in the debate about new state assessments developed in consortia: that of the best teachers in the country. This research suggests, despite challenges still to overcome, that these front-line experts believe that the new consortia tests are an improvement on the…