The post-pandemic return to school posed many challenges for educational leaders. Administrative teams had to come up with plans to close achievement gaps created by an extended period of remote learning. One suburban New Jersey high school identified at-risk students and created an Academic Mentoring Support (AMS) program as an intervention. Once…

This study focused on a problem of practice at Mystic River School (MRS), a kindergarten through eighth grade school in an urban district in New England. Schoolwide diagnostic data showed a significant gap between multilingual learners (MLs) and their native English speaking peers in literacy. An analysis of this data, interviews with staff and…

At all levels of education, the racial achievement gap in performance between Black and Latino students and their White peers stubbornly persists. While the causes of this gap are numerous and interrelated, one theory posits that students from underrepresented racial groups may face stereotype threat, meaning that fear of failing and thereby…

English language learners (ELLs) lack academic vocabulary knowledge, an essential component that explains much of the persistent achievement gap between students who start schools as ELLs and their monolingual peers. This single-subject experimental design study addressed this issue by focusing on self-regulated vocabulary learning that helps ELLs…

This "Success Gaps Rubric: Addressing Equity, Inclusion, and Opportunity" is designed to help any school district or school identify the root causes for success gaps, which are gaps in performance between groups of children in a district or school. The rubric uses the term children because, although the children may range in age from…

The period of early adolescence is characterized by dramatic changes, simultaneously affecting physiological, psychological, social, and cognitive development. The physical transition from elementary to middle school can exacerbate the stress and adversity experienced during this critical life stage. Middle school students often struggle to find…

This rubric can help schools or districts address success gaps that exist between groups of their students, such as gaps in test scores or graduation rates between students with disabilities and other students. The rubric allows a team of users from a school or district to systematically examine the root causes of a success gap by focusing on…

A year of distance learning under COVID-19 has fueled growing concerns about the academic progress and social and emotional health of children. In particular, worries increased around how the pandemic has affected high-need and underserved students, including English Learners and children with disabilities, children in foster care and from…

Reading achievement scores for adolescents with disabilities are markedly lower than the scores of adolescents without disabilities. For example, 62% of students with disabilities read "below" the basic level on the NAEP Reading assessment, compared to 19% of their nondisabled peers. This achievement gap has been a continuing challenge…

The Native American and Alaska Native Children in School (NAM) discretionary grants program aims to reduce the persistent achievement gaps between Native American and Alaska Native (NA/AN) youth and their peers on measures of reading and English language arts (ELA) (NCES 2015) and on measures of college-readiness in reading (ACT 2017). One reason…

This study used a mixed-methods approach to examine the effects of the Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) program from the student perspective, specifically focusing on factors associated with student resilience. The AVID program aims to close the achievement gap among predominantly minority and low-income students without a family…

This document reports on the impacts on student achievement for four supplemental reading curricula that use similar overlapping instructional strategies designed to improve reading comprehension in social studies and science text. Fifth-grade reading comprehension for each of three commercially-available curricula (Project CRISS, ReadAbout, and…