There exist passionate debates about the best way to teach children to read. Since the Bush administration, school districts receiving federal funds have been required to have research evidence justifying their methods of teaching reading, and in recent years the need for evidence-based practices have intensified with the "Science of…

In this article, the author discusses the work of a public-school teacher in New York City whose commitment to social justice has led to the design and teaching of a lesson that directly addresses the meanings and manifestations of social class with her fourth- and fifth-grade students.

We compared 2014-15 New York State Science Assessment scores of fourth grade students who received the New York Sun Works (NYSW) Program (n = 638) with two comparison groups: students who received NYSW the following year (n = 993) and students attending matched schools (n = 1490). We first applied a multi-level regression model to compare scores…

The purpose of this study was to understand the nature of writing instruction across time and grade bands. We used quantitative and qualitative analyses of teacher interviews and video records of classroom instruction of English language arts writing instruction in 97 fourth- through eighth-grade classrooms in 2010 and 2018. Video records showed a…

Social changes have resulted in an increase of students living in households that do not include both a mother and a father, reducing the efficacy of common survey questionnaire approaches to measuring student socioeconomic status (SES). This paper presents two studies conducted to develop and test a new,more inclusive set of student SES items…

Research has shown that racial/ethnic diversity in elementary schools and classrooms benefits children's academic achievement and feelings of safety and belonging. The current study aimed to expand on existing research by examining associations between classroom racial/ethnic composition and upper elementary children's social-emotional development…

What are indicators, or markers, of 'inclusive' reading classrooms? As elementary school teachers across the United States are increasingly required to teach reading to diverse, heterogenous groups of students within the same classroom space, practitioners and researchers seek to identify what constitutes 'inclusion' in reading instruction. This…

The opt-out movement, a grassroots coalition of opposition to high-stakes tests that are used to sort students, evaluate teachers, and rank schools, has the largest participation on Long Island, New York, where approximately 50% of the eligible students in grades three to eight opted out of the English Language Arts (ELA) and Mathematics tests in…

Background: Turn 2 Us (T2U) is an elementary school-based mental health promotion and prevention program in New York City. It targets fourth- and fifth-grade students at risk for social/emotional and behavioral problems and provides a range of services to students, staff, and parents. The purpose of this study is to determine if T2U decreases…

Although Black and Latinx students disproportionately face exclusionary school discipline, prior research finds that the likelihood of suspension for Black students decreases when they are taught by greater proportions of Black teachers. Little prior work, however, has examined whether these effects generalize to large, diverse, urban school…

This research sought to uncover challenges that arose in the implementation of the Reflective Educational Approach to Character and Health (REACH) after-school programme in a low-income public school in New York City. Additionally, we wanted to find and share some of the lessons learned, to help others avoid our pitfalls when implementing quality…

This study examined what factors might have a positive impact on students' learning outcomes in mathematical understanding and computational thinking skills. Specifically, whether the proposed instructional design combining computational perspectives and an embodied approach in mathematics learning improves (a) mathematics learning, (b)…

This article explores inequity in access to and provision of bus service across student sociodemographic groups and examines possible barriers to bus access and utilization. To so do, we use administrative data on New York City K-6 public school students from 2011-2017, including information on race/ethnicity, poverty status, distance from home to…

We apply "value-added" models to estimate the effects of teachers on an outcome they cannot plausibly affect: student height. When fitting the relatively simple models that are widely used in educational practice to New York City data, we find the standard deviation of teacher effects on height is nearly as large as that for math and…

In his campaign for Mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio positioned himself as the candidate most determined to break with the legacy of the outgoing Michael Bloomberg administration. Voters responded enthusiastically, handing de Blasio a nearly 50-point margin of victory in the November 2013 election. De Blasio, a Democrat, interpreted the win…