This brief describes an evaluation of academic intervention supports available to high school students in Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) during the 2012-2013 school year. A website review identified information about academic supports available to students or parents within each high school's web pages. A survey of school staff gathered…

Standardized academic testing, under-performing schools, demands for high standards in America's schools and current levels of student dropouts have resulted in renewed calls for "getting tough on student retention." The push for student retention is demanded by school boards and others in spite of the overwhelming research evidence that…

The Learning Communities Demonstration is a national research project that is testing the effectiveness of learning communities in six community colleges across the United States: Merced College in California; The Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC) in Baltimore, Maryland; Hillsborough Community College in Tampa, Florida; Houston…

The purpose of this phenomenological study was to determine the common programs and practices that Beating the Odds (BTO) high schools in California are using to achieve high graduation rates. More specifically, this study identifies specific programs and practices that the high schools are using to address at-risk student behaviors as well as…

The Concurrent Courses Initiative (CCI), funded by The James Irvine Foundation from 2008 until 2011, comprised eight secondary/postsecondary partnerships across California that offered dual enrollment programs with supplemental student supports. The goal of the CCI was to expand access to supportive, career-focused dual enrollment for students…

In 2011, the Campaign for Educational Equity established the Safeguarding Sound Basic Education Project. One of the major components of this project has been to gather and analyze data about the availability of resources and services in high-needs schools both in New York City and around the state. A number of groups have issued statistical…

The overarching goal of the "Supporting Best Practices in Student Success Project" is to create, enhance, or expand successful programs that are replicable and can be scaled to greatly improve the percentage of underserved students who complete postsecondary education. In doing so, National College Access Network (NCAN) aimed to build…

Students, who are at risk of academic failure, are reading and achieving below their grade level yet the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act requires that all students perform on or above grade level. Results from the 2003 National Assessment of Education Program (NAEP) showed that 37% of fourth graders across the United States are reading below grade…

The Wake County Public School System (WCPSS) has numerous programs and strategies to support students who are underachieving. Given the variety of support sources and the different ways in which WCPSS schools keep track of the type of support provided to students, it is often difficult at the district level to discern the full extent to which…

Teacher candidates train in an educational world that has changed dramatically. The tensions and challenges that preservice teachers experience are a reality for teacher education programs and must be planned for. The authors from a teacher preparation program describe the steps they have taken to support more authentic and integrated work with…

The education of under-prepared college students is a topic that interested and motivated this researcher to conduct a study on learning communities and measuring change in writing apprehension and locus of control of developmental students at a community college. Higher education is generally viewed as a place for the intellectually elite.…

In January 2009, in the last week of the Bush Administration, the U.S. Department of Education (ED), upon orders from the departing political appointee staff, published the final report in a long running National Evaluation of Upward Bound (UB). The study was conducted by the contractor, Mathematica Policy Research. After more than a year in…

In 2009, the National Center for Postsecondary Research (NCPR) launched an evaluation of eight developmental summer bridge programs in Texas to assess whether these programs reduce the need for developmental coursework and improve student outcomes in college. The evaluation uses an experimental design to measure the effects of these programs on…

The purpose of this issues brief was to obtain a better understanding of how online programs are dealing with students who have been identified as at-risk. The first section, "Strategies for Working with At-Risk Student Populations in Online Environments," documents a sampling of K-12 online programs currently working with at-risk…

When students fail courses or drop out of school, it isn't good for them or their districts, which are under federal and state mandates to improve test scores and graduation rates. With those mandates and about 1.2 million students dropping out each year--or one every 26 seconds--there is more pressure today than ever to help students stay in…