The Improving Basic Programs effort in Title I, Part A (Title I) of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA), as amended by the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 (ESSA), is designed to ensure that all children have a fair, equal, and significant opportunity to obtain a high-quality education and achieve, at a minimum, proficiency…

Imagine Math® is a standards-aligned, adaptive, interactive online mathematics program designed to supplement in-class instruction for students. This evaluation report examined the fidelity of implementation of Imagine Math® and the associations between its use and student achievement in Houston Independent School District (HISD) secondary schools…

The State of Texas makes provision for students to be enrolled in career and technical education (CTE) courses including dual credit courses that would prepare them for occupations identified by local businesses to be in high demand. Knowledge of labor market projections is essential in the design of CTE programs of study (Houston ISD, 2018). CTE…

Since established by an Appropriations Act in 2006, the Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) competitive grant program in the U.S. Department of Education (USDE) has supported human capital strategies "to ensure that students attending high-poverty schools have better access to effective teachers and principals, especially in hard-to-staff subject…

This program evaluation assessed the utility and efficacy of lead4ward toward facilitating meaningful instructional planning, and improving STAAR reading, English language arts, and math performance of students whose teachers participated in lead4ward professional development. A web-based survey on HISD's HUB yielded responses from 340 educators…

This study explored outcomes related to students' participation in a Houston Symphony (HS) partnership at a targeted HISD elementary school. Students received weekly in-school core enrichment instruction and after-school violin instruction by Houston Symphony Community-Embedded Musicians throughout the 2018-2019 academic year. The study found that…

Each year, the Houston Independent School District (HISD) offers a summer education program designed to assist students with a variety of instructional needs. Centrally coordinated summer school programs in 2020 included accelerated instruction for State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) and STAAR End-of-Course (EOC) re-testers;…

In August 2010, the Smithsonian Science Education Center (SSEC) received a grant of more than $25 million from the U.S. Department of Education's Investing in Innovation (i3) program for a five-year study to validate its Leadership Assistance for Science Education Reform (LASER) model in three very diverse regions of the United States: rural North…

Achieve3000®, a web-based differentiated reading program based on the Lexile® Framework and designed to improve student reading ability and comprehension of increasingly complex texts, was made available to approximately 100,000 secondary students across 98 HISD schools during the 2017-2018 academic year. The present evaluation, using a select…

Literacy in the Middle (LIM) is a sixth- through eighth-grade literacy initiative being implemented in the Houston Independent School District (HISD). The initiative is an extension of the Literacy by 3 initiative being implemented at the elementary school level, district-wide. LIM focuses on literacy across the curriculum, including the core…

The Texas Education Code (§ 29.051) requires school districts to provide every language minority student with the opportunity to participate in either a bilingual or English as a second language (ESL) program. This evaluation report summarizes the performance of students who participated in the district's Dual Language Bilingual Program. Included…

During the 2015-2016 academic year, the parents of 4,974 students participated in APTT [Academic Parent Teacher Teams] at 10 Title 1 elementary schools in the Houston Independent School District (HISD). Students were predominately economically disadvantaged and at risk of dropping out of school. The impact of the program was assessed using the…

In August 2010, the Smithsonian Science Education Center (SSEC) received a grant of more than $25 million from the U.S. Department of Education's Investing in Innovation (i3) program for a five-year study to validate its Leadership Assistance for Science Education Reform (LASER) model in three very diverse regions of the United States: rural North…

The State Compensatory Education (SCE) program is designed to reduce dropout rates and increase academic performance of students identified as being at-risk of dropping out of school. For this year's evaluation of SCE, the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) served as the state assessment measures for grades 3 through 8 and…

In August 2010, the Smithsonian Science Education Center (SSEC) received a grant of more than $25 million from the U.S. Department of Education's Investing in Innovation (i3) program for a five-year study to validate its Leadership Assistance for Science Education Reform (LASER) model in three very diverse regions of the United States: rural North…