The purpose of this quantitative study was to examine whether English as a Second Language (ESL) Hispanic students, attendance at Title I or Non-Title I schools, and percentage of Bilingual/ESL teachers on campus impacted academic performance as measured by standardized tests. With a rapidly expanding Hispanic population in Texas, it was prudent…

Chicago Public Schools and school districts throughout the country are seeking new ways to foster racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic equity as desegregation consent decrees are being lifted. One of Chicago's selective enrollment high schools drafted parents, educators, administrators, and community representatives to address its own diversity…

For years, points out David L. Kirp, critics have lambasted public schools as fossilized bureaucracies run by paper-pushers and filled with time-serving teachers preoccupied with their job security, not the lives of their students. Yet, as this article describes, running an exemplary school system does not demand heroes or heroics, just hard and…

This quantitative and qualitative study sought to examine the factors that teachers in a poor socio-economic, high-minority, urban, inner-city school district determined were important when gauging their effectiveness in the classroom. The study focused on the selection of specific factors by approximately seventy-five teachers from seven of eight…

In order to systemically improve student achievement in elementary literacy, a large urban school district partnered with a local university to develop a model for high-quality professional development that hopefully would result in long-term changes in teachers' literacy instructional/practices. Schools were selected based on their Adequate…

Melissa Roderick, Jenny Nagaoka, and Vanessa Coca focus on the importance of improving college access and readiness for low-income and minority students in urban high schools. They stress the aspirations-attainment gap: although the college aspirations of all U.S. high school students, regardless of race, ethnicity, and family income, have…

This Institute for Developmental Studies (IDS) program was established in 1958, and represented an attempt to study the inter-play of environment on psychological development, and to evolve and develop an enriched and stimulating school curriculum for socially disadvantaged children. Over the years, the IDS program has evolved into a comprehensive…

Most African Americans in urban areas are trapped in schools that are below the national norms for reading, mathematics, or both. These young people are not only shut off from written information about their own cultural heritage, but they also are least likely to learn much about others. The majority of African Americans in the United States are…

This report explores issues related to accountability in the context of Children Achieving, the school reform effort of Philadelphia (Pennsylvania). The accountability system begins with content standards in English/language arts, mathematics, science, and the arts. The Stanford-9 Achievement Test has been designated to assess how students are…

This report is one in a series of needs assessment publications that comprise the first phase of PROJECT DESIGN, an ESEA Title III project administered by the Fresno City Unified School District. The purpose of this study was to develop an achievement analysis model and to analyze achievement of students in the Fresno City Schools with reference…

The present research was conducted to determine the relative importance of a variety of background variables and school effects on curriculum assignment in public high schools. The emphasis was on the sociological processes of selection and differentiation within schools, and the role of education in facilitating or blocking social mobility. A…

During 1985-86 the Division of Special Education of the New York Board of Education operated a Chapter 1/P.S.E.N. Remedial Reading and Mathematics Program which served approximately 11,500 English-speaking and limited English Proficient (LEP) students. Of these, 9,627 received reading instruction alone, and 119 received remedial instruction in…

This evaluation assesses the impact of New Jersey's Reading Recovery program on first-grade students in the Newark School District. The report presents results from two cohorts and is divided into two main sections. Section 1 deals with the achievement of the students from the 1991-1992 academic year. Their performance at the end of first grade in…

The Comprehensive Achievement Monitoring (CAM) model for project evaluation is compared with the usual classroom testing and pretest-posttest approaches. All three techniques are described and then examined in detail with respect to their advantages and limitations. The resources of project CAM in the areas of urban education and computer software…

A group of seven conference papers, all dealing with the role of testing and evaluation in the schools, is presented in this document. The papers are as follows: (1) "Framework for Effective Schools" (Eric Cooper), which identifies indicators of efficacy, quality, and equity; (2) "Quality Indicators for Monitoring Equity"…