As one component of a functional behavioral assessment, descriptive assessments (DA) can help determine the maintaining variable of a student's problem behavior in school. School districts often employ board-certified behavior analysts as consultants to conduct DAs by observing a student and recording the environmental variables surrounding…

Federal law requires states and school districts to institute accountability systems that report disaggregated student data to ensure that all children make academic progress. However, one of the mandated categories for disaggregation -- English Learner (EL) -- is reported as a single group despite representing students who are beginning,…

Purpose/Objective: Under the reauthorized Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), states and districts retain greater discretion over the measures included in school quality report cards. Moreover, ESSA now requires states to expand their measurement efforts to address factors like school climate. This shift toward more comprehensive measures of school…

Concerns about the equitable distribution of school funding within and across school districts have led to new federal data collections on school-level expenditures. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) required states to collect and report, for the first time, school-level data on both personnel and non-personnel expenditures…

This guide for district and school leaders shows how to recognize opportunities to embed randomized controlled trials (RCTs) into planned policies or programs. Opportunistic RCTs can generate strong evidence for informing education decisions--with minimal added cost and disruption. The guide also outlines the key steps to conduct RCTs and responds…

Professional development is a necessary component of maintaining competency in professional practice. Technology has opened the door to new formats for delivering professional development, in addition to more traditional modes of training. This study compared three professional development formats for improving the quality of standards-based…

Response to Intervention (RTI) is a service model designed to meet the learning needs of students prior to diagnosis and placement in special education settings. Results of a quantitative quasi-experimental research study to investigate the relationship between the RTI plan and self-reported implementation practices among general education…

This three-volume report describes the "SAM (School Administration Manager) process," an approach that about 700 schools around the nation are using to direct more of principals' time and effort to improve teaching and learning in classrooms. Research has shown that a principal's instructional leadership is second only to teaching among…

While theoretical conceptualizations of language policy have grown increasingly rich, empirical data that test these models are less common. Further, there is little methodological guidance for those who wish to do research on language policy interpretation and appropriation. The ethnography of language policy is proposed as a method which makes…

Students who leave elementary school after fourth grade may not be receiving adequate literacy instruction. Although many recent studies have focused on a drop in test scores for middle school students, a gap exists in the literature with regard to explicit literacy instruction in elementary and non-elementary school settings. To inform educators…

New Jersey school districts establish curriculums to meet the proficiencies found in the New Jersey Core Curriculum Content Standards (NJCCCS). The research focuses on the effectiveness of the Washington Township High School Career and Technology Education Department's curriculum in addressing the NJCCS Financial Literacy benchmarks. The…

Education, it seems, is increasingly driven by the numbers. Whether it is measuring student performance or a school district's ability to balance the books, one will find data out there about it. So much data, in fact, that it is difficult to sort through all the numbers to get the needed information. This article describes California's Ed-Data…

A long standing debate among policymakers as well as researchers is whether and how funding affects the quality of education. Often missing from the discussion is information about the costs of providing education at the school level and below, yet such information could impart a better indication of the linkages between outcomes and resources…

Charter schools are a relatively new, but fast-growing, phenomenon in American public education. As such, they merit the attention of all parties interested in the education of the nation's youth. The present report comprises two separate analyses. The first is a "combined analysis" in which hierarchical linear models (HLMs) were…

Background: Current federal, state, and local school accountability measures as well as policy initiatives that call for improved leadership have placed increasing demands on principals. Many districts face shortages of appropriate candidates for the job; popularly, this shortage is explained by the fact that simply too few hero-principals exist…