Project Explore targeted minority students in grades six through eight who attended 28 Houston Independent School District (HISD) middle schools during the 2019-2020 academic year. In 2019-2020, a total of 2,095 students were accepted for participation in the Project Explore program, and an additional 715 students were waitlisted for program…

This study compared the summer learning rates of students who attended Houston Independent School District (HISD) 2016 summer school to similar students who did not attend, for both promoted and retained students. For students between 1st and 2nd grade and those between 2nd and 3rd grade, summer learning rates were faster for both promoted and…

Vocabulary.com is an online adaptive game that teaches students words by systematic exposure to a variety of question types and activities and by understanding all the word meanings and nuances as they are learned. Vocabulary.com teaches 14,000 words using over 208,000 questions. It has been implemented with the Houston Independent School…

Despite its promise to help teachers meet the needs of diverse learners, district usage of Achieve3000® among most students with access to it remains far below the optimal level necessary for them to realize literacy growth and college and career readiness. Only a tiny minority of students (402 out of about 111,000) seem to be engaging Achieve3000…

Strategic Reading and Writing (SRW) is a reading and writing intervention course available to sixth- through tenth-grade students in the Houston Independent School District (HISD) who did not meet Grade Level standards on the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) grades 3-8 reading the previous school year or who fell below the…

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…

Dyslexia is considered a learning disorder characterized by difficulty in learning to read, write, and spell despite conventional instruction, adequate intelligence, and sociocultural opportunities (TEC§38.003 cited in Texas Education Agency, 2014). The Texas Education Code (TEC) §38.003 makes provision for the evaluation and identification of…

In May of 2012, the Houston Independent School District (HISD) Board of Education approved the creation of the Secondary Reading Initiative (SRI) program to target students in the 6th and 9th grades who are reading below the 50th percentile as measured by the Stanford/Aprenda Achievement Test in the previous year. The district provided to have…

Beginning with the 2012-2013 school year, the Houston Independent School District (HISD) Board of Education approved the creation of the Secondary Reading Initiative (SRI) for 6th and 9th grade students. In the 2013-2014 school year, the SRI program was expanded to include students in the 7th grade. Students in the 6th, 7th, and 9th grades, whose…

For the past three years, SELF (Sports, Education, Life Skills, and Faith) has focused on improving academic, behavioral, and social skills of students at Key, Revere, and Meyerland middle schools in the Houston Independent School District (HISD). Tutorials, an essay contest, character-building lessons, sports, a high-school bridge program, and…

Parent, school, and community engagement is widely established as a collaborative strategy to improve the school experience and educational outcomes for children and youth (Epstein & Sanders, 2006; SEDL, 2013; Weiss, Lopez, & Rosenberg, 2011; Barr & Saltmarsh, 2014). Consistent with this viewpoint, the Houston Independent School…

The SELF Foundation afterschool program involved 255 students at Key, Revere, and Meyerland (formerly Johnston) middle schools in tutorials and enrichment activities to support their academic, social, and emotional development. All students at SELF schools were allowed to participate in a character-building essay contest for prizes. Program impact…

The SELF Foundation engaged 287 students at Key, Revere, and Welch middle schools in afterschool tutorials and enrichment activities to support their academic, social, and emotional development. Program impact was measured using reading and math performance, attendance, and disciplinary actions of SELF Foundation students compared to…

The Houston Independent School District offered five different bilingual programs for language minority students during the 2012-2013 school year. In the Pre-Exit phase of bilingual education, students transition to a predominantly English-language instruction program in core subject areas. This report summarizes the performance of students who…