The purpose of this quantitative, causal-comparative study was to determine the impact of the year-round education school calendar on the standardized test performance of fifth grade African American students, as measured by the Illinois Standards Achievement Test (ISAT) in reading. The ISAT reading scores from two year-round education (YRE)…

"Charter School Performance in New Jersey" examined whether students in grades 3-8 attending charter schools in New Jersey made more gains in math and reading achievement than similar students attending traditional public schools. Based on an analysis across charter schools, the authors reported that charter school students made…

The purpose of this paper is to develop a framework for measuring innovation in charter schools. The authors ask two questions: (1) What practices constitute innovation in various local and state contexts?; and (2) Do levels and types of innovation differ between charter schools and traditional public schools? The authors' sample frame includes…

This paper provides the first comparison of principals' preferences for teacher characteristics across traditional public and charter schools. Understanding how charter principals' preferences differ from those of public school principals contributes to scholarship on both teacher labor markets and charter schools. One of the first studies of…

Open distance learning (ODL) has long been an important option for formal and non-formal education (NFE) in most developed and developing countries, but less so in post-conflict countries, including Cambodia. However, in Cambodia there is now greater awareness that ODL can complement traditional face-to-face educational approaches, particularly as…

Magnet schools hold a prominent place in the history of education reforms in the United States. Best known for offering unique programs or curricula to attract students from outside a school's neighborhood, many magnet schools started off as neighborhood public schools but converted with the goals of increasing student diversity and achievement.…

In this paper, the authors examine differences between school types in the uses of ability grouping, instructional differences, and relationship of ability grouping to student mathematics achievement. Specifically, they address the following questions with teacher reports of students' mathematics placement in middle school: (1) Does the use of…

School vouchers are the most contentious form of parental school choice. Vouchers provide government funds that parents can use to send their children to private schools of their choice. Here we examine the empirical question of whether or not a school voucher program in Washington, DC, affected achievement or the rate of high school graduation…

Early college high schools are a new and rapidly spreading model that merges the high school and college experiences and that is designed to increase the number of students who graduate from high school and enroll and succeed in postsecondary education. This article presents results from a federally funded experimental study of the impact of the…

National mandates such as the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 and the state of Texas standardized system of accountability pressures educators to provide optimum educational experiences for our students. The momentous challenge is not just to educate students who can compete in the 21st century global society but to prepare them for the most…

Research examining child-care providers' beliefs and behaviour has produced contradictory evidence perhaps because analyses commonly examine providers as a homogenous group. Among providers in the Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, we used cluster analysis to identify groups based on profiles of beliefs. We found evidence for five…

This study is relevant to parents, private organizations, and the educational system interested in discovering whether charter school students perform better academically than traditional public elementary school students. The Pennsylvania System of School Assessment data were used to analyze and compare student performance in grades 3-5 from two…

The purpose of this study was to examine two types of school organizational structures: elementary open-enrollment charter schools and elementary traditional public schools. The study examined the degree to which attendance rates (based upon the prior school year's data), class size and average number of years of teaching experience were related…

This issue brief focuses on one particular report, released in September 2009, that has been widely cited by charter school advocates because it appears to show remarkable results. In the report, "How New York City's Charter Schools Affect Achievement," Stanford University professor Caroline Hoxby and her colleagues Sonali Murarka and…

The purpose of this study was to investigate fifth-grade student achievement in Ohio public charter schools as compared to student achievement in traditional public schools, and to determine whether the performance of charter schools changed over time. Research questions asked 1) how does student achievement in Ohio's public charters compare to…