This State-specific summary report serves as an assessment of Georgia's Year 1 Race to the Top implementation, highlighting successes and accomplishments, identifying challenges, and providing lessons learned from implementation to date. Georgia's first-year accomplishments include awarding the State's first five Race to the Top Innovation Fund…

This State-specific summary report serves as an assessment of Hawaii's Year 1 Race to the Top implementation, highlighting successes and accomplishments, identifying challenges, and providing lessons learned from implementation to date. This past year, Hawaii significantly improved collaboration among the Governor's Office, the HIDOE (Hawaii…

This State-specific summary report serves as an assessment of Maryland's Year 1 Race to the Top implementation, highlighting successes and accomplishments, identifying challenges, and providing lessons learned from implementation to date. Maryland's Year 1 accomplishments include critical capacity-building at the Maryland State Department of…

Researchers express growing concern over the increasing higher education achievement gap between subgroups of Black American students (e.g., Massey, Mooney, Torres, & Charles, 2007). Whereas the number of degrees awarded to Black females has consistently grown for each of the past twenty years, the number of degrees awarded to Black males during…

This is the fourth report of a process evaluation of Palm Beach County Prime Time, Inc., an intermediary organization dedicated to improving the quality of afterschool programs, by Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago. It covers the 2007-2008 program year, which was the inaugural year of Prime Time's formal Quality Improvement System (QIS)…

The purpose of this study, funded by Jobs for the Future through a grant to the Massachusetts Community Colleges Executive Office, was to: (1) provide an update on the status of developmental education within Massachusetts community colleges; (2) shed light on the alignment between research-based best practices to advance success among…

This study examines from a geographical perspective the factors that impact the performance of public elementary schools in New York City during 2001-2005, a period when its schools were undergoing major reforms at both the local and national level. Education reforms have focused their attention on schools by increasing their responsibility and…

The interplay between sociopolitical forces and economic agendas becomes apparent when one examines the June 28, 2007 United States Supreme Court Decision, Parents Involved In Community Schools v. Seattle School District . In a reversal of the 1954 Brown Decision, the United States Supreme Court ruled that public schools could not use race as a…

Building on their important findings in "The Source of the River," the authors now probe even more deeply into minority underachievement at the college level. "Taming the River" examines the academic and social dynamics of different ethnic groups during the first two years of college. Focusing on racial differences in academic performance, the…

To better understand the views of teachers and administrators on the high school dropout problem, focus groups and nationally representative surveys were conducted of high school teachers and principals. A focus group of superintendents and school board members was also included. To help interpret the results, the authors convened a colloquium…

The Center for Educational Innovation-Public Education Association (CEI-PEA) established the Colman Genn Lecture Series to honor the work and achievements of CEI-PEA Senior Fellow Colman Genn. The annual lecture takes place in New York City and features individuals who are making significant contributions to the advancement of public education for…

SREB states were among the first in the nation to implement statewide high school exams. Today, these exams are a key component of each state's accountability system. This report identifies which states use comprehensive exams and which use end-of-course exams, how students perform on them, and whether achievement gaps have narrowed. It also…

"Straight A's: Public Education Policy and Progress" is a biweekly newsletter that focuses on education news and events both in Washington, DC and around the country. The following articles are included in this issue: (1) The Value of Enhanced Reading Opportunities in High Schools: Report Finds Supplemental Reading Programs Can Improve…

The most exciting innovation in education policy in the last decade is the emergence of highly effective schools in our nation's inner cities, schools where disadvantaged teens make enormous gains in academic achievement. In this book, the author takes readers inside six of these secondary schools and reveals the secret to their success: they are…

In this article, the authors report achievement outcomes of a multisite cluster randomized field trial of Open Court Reading 2005 (OCR), a K-6 literacy curriculum published by SRA/McGraw-Hill. The participants are 49 first-grade through fifth-grade classrooms from predominantly minority and poor contexts across the nation. Blocking by grade level…