"Xtreme Reading" is a supplemental literacy curriculum designed to improve the literacy skills of struggling students in grades 6 to 12. The curriculum is primarily designed to help students improve their vocabulary, decoding, fluency, and reading comprehension skills. To ensure a productive learning environment, students initially learn…

"Xtreme Reading" is a supplemental literacy curriculum designed to improve the literacy skills of struggling students in grades 6 to 12. The curriculum is primarily designed to help students improve their vocabulary, decoding, fluency, and reading comprehension skills. To ensure a productive learning environment, students initially learn…

The Peer Enabled Restructured Classroom (PERC) is an instructional innovation developed to address gaps in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) in urban high schools. The PERC model changes instruction from teacher led to peer led by bringing peer students into the classroom to lead small-group work. Our study sought to provide…

The authors of this article describe their inquiry into implementation of the writing-focused Common Core State Standards in a co-taught English 9 class in an urban school. They describe instructional moves designed to increase student success with an assignment called the Gift Essay, with particular focus on planning and other organizational…

In the general activity of daily life, it is easy to miss our dependency on the Earth's ecology. At the same time that people are living apparently separate from the environment, our impact on the Earth is increasing. This study seeks to understand how teachers can bridge this persistent disconnect of daily life from ecology and human impact.…

This report describes a follow-up qualitative study, conducted in 2006 by the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, of a small group of New York City high schools that, according to 2001 data, were "beating the odds" in preparing low-performing ninth-grade students for timely high school graduation and college going. The thirteen…

New Visions for Public Schools has leveraged student-level data to help schools identify at-risk students, designed metrics to capture student progress toward graduation, developed data tools and reports that visualize student progress at different levels of aggregation for different audiences, and implemented real-time data systems for educators.…

This article explores the results of a study of Latino youth in New York City public high schools. We propose that the common element among the schools is what we call here "transcaring," an overarching culture of care that allows for the creation of third spaces within school, transcending traditional dichotomies around language,…

This research is distinctive in that a mixed-methods approach, employing both cogenerative dialogues and student responses from the Constructivist Learning Environment Survey (CLES), was used to help to understand 9th grade urban students' experiences in their biochemistry class in New York City. Factor analyses of student responses demonstrated…

In this study, twenty-five high school English language learners were observed in their classrooms in a New York City public school while they worked in small groups. All observations were video recorded or done by the researcher while in the classrooms. The videos were then transcribed. Communication strategies that the participants used were…

The ominous prediction is that New York City eighth-graders in the 2010 cohort will enter high school only slightly better prepared than the 2004 cohort to meet the Regents-diploma requirements. Their challenge will likely be compounded by higher Regents examination standards. Without widespread implementation of effective strategies to assist…

Increases in substance use prevalence among girls, as well as a lack of research conducted with urban girls of color, highlight the importance of understanding both predictors and outcomes of substance use abstinence (SUA) within this population. This study addresses gaps in SUA research through a longitudinal investigation conducted with urban…

This study reports the preliminary results from a field test of the College-readiness Performance Assessment System (C-PAS), a large-scale, 6th-12th grade criterion-referenced assessment system that utilizes classroom-embedded performance tasks to measure student progress toward the development of key cognitive skills associated with success in…

Across the nation, urban school districts struggle to raise often abysmally low high school graduation rates. New York City, with a four-year graduation rate of 57 percent, is no exception. Yet, some high schools in New York, as elsewhere, succeed beyond expectations in bringing students with low academic skills and high needs to graduation in…

An increasing number of urban districts are scrapping traditional high school grade structures, changing their retention policies, and devising more flexible routes toward graduation to address high dropout rates. Educators in Baltimore, Boston, Houston and Rochester, New York say they are particularly focused on the 9th grade, a year when many…