This study investigates how teachers interact with immigrant-origin youth in school-based contexts of reception that mediate youth's educational opportunities. One understudied context is sheltered instruction, where English learners (ELs) are placed into separate content-area courses to target their linguistic needs. This qualitative study…

Changing demographics, low Latino graduation rates, and changes to education funding--nationally and locally--challenge society to develop innovative strategies to navigate transformations affecting public education. This article presents findings from a collaborative community-engaged evaluation of a dropout prevention program for at-risk male…

The 2001 renewal of the United States' Title I program instituted the Supplemental Educational Services (SES) program, through which students attending schools that fail to make adequate yearly progress (AYP) for 3 consecutive years are offered tutoring in core subjects. Although some SES evaluations have measured provider effects on student…

Communities In Schools, Inc. (CIS) is a nationwide initiative designed to connect needed community resources with schools to help students, particularly those identified as at-risk, successfully learn, stay in school, and prepare for life. As part of a comprehensive 5-year national evaluation of CIS, ICF International conducted a school-level…

In this article, we report kindergarten student and teacher outcomes from a quasi-experimental evaluation of The Superkids, a systematic, phonics-based, comprehensive K-2 reading program. We recruited 23 kindergarten teachers to implement The Superkids program from a diverse, yet predominantly ethnic minority, group of classrooms from across the…

As with many districtwide reform efforts, the San Diego reform sought to improve classroom instruction by focusing on building the capacity of teachers. This article examines practices of teacher professional development in the district and their impact on literacy instruction. Through examination of the literature on effective professional…

In a series of reforms started in 1998 and formalized with the 2000 introduction of the Blueprint for Student Success, the San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD) implemented a wide-ranging series of reforms designed to boost the literacy skills of students. This article provides an overview of the reforms, assesses the contributions made by the…

Much continues to be written about the failure of U.S. schools to provide a quality education for at-risk urban students. Private Nativity model schools have been instituted in response to the need to provide quality education at the middle school level for such students. As the number of these and other alternative middle schools increases, a…

Supplemental Educational Services (SES), a component of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, provides free tutoring to economically disadvantaged children who are attending Title I schools in their 2nd or more years of school improvement. This research evaluated SES in Tennessee to determine the: (a) impacts on student achievement, and (b)…

This article presents an outcome-based model for evaluating school and community programs serving at-risk adolescents, and a cost-effective technique for comparing the progress of youth receiving an intervention with youth in a pseudocontrol group. The outcomes considered most important for success were derived from the literature pertaining to…

This article presents the research findings of an evaluation of the academic impacts of 21st Century Learning Centers (CCLC) in Louisiana. Using quasi-experimental design, the article operationalizes academic achievement as core and subject test performance on nationally standardized pre- and posttests (Iowa Test of Basic Skills; ITBS). Based on…

Comprehensive school reform (CSR) is only as effective as its implementation. By using data collected for the National Longitudinal Evaluation of Comprehensive School Reform (NLECSR), this article explores the factors that predict CSR model implementation and the ways that CSR model implementation varies. We found little difference in the fidelity…

The evaluation of the Voyager Universal Literacy System[R] was designed to provide a rigorous assessment of the effectiveness of the program with beginning readers. Using a quasi-experimental design, researchers conducted a systematic evaluation of changes in 398 kindergarten students' command of early reading skills in 4 Voyager and 4 comparison…

Components of the School Renaissance[R] program, including Accelerated Reader and Reading Renaissance, have been implemented in more than 65,000 schools in the United States. Despite the program's popularity, there have been no published, well-controlled evaluations of its effectiveness. This randomized field experiment was designed to gauge…

Evaluation of the Baltimore City Public School System (BCPSS) city-state partnership examined: whether BCPSS improved student achievement and system management, whether improvements related to new state-mandated governance structures, and whether levels and use of funds were sufficient. Highlights data collection and methodology, student test…