Tag » achievement

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  Improving Education: The Promise of Inclusive Schooling

  1/28/07 - Dianne L. Ferguson, Audrey Desjarlais, Gwen Meyer, Equity Alliance at ASU

  The purpose of education is to ensure that every student gains access to knowledge, skills, and information that will prepare them to contribute to America’s communities and workplaces. This central purpose is made more challenging as schools must accommodate students with ever more diverse backgrounds, abilities, and interests. For students with disabilities, achieving this common purpose means thinking again about the consequences of special and general education as separate systems, and...

• Inclusive Education for Equity

  1/1/09 - Equity Alliance at ASU,, Kathleen King

  Inclusive education, in policy and practice, rejects the exclusion and segregation of students, for ANY reason: gender, language, household income, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, national origin, ability, or any dis/ability. Simultaneously, because of an active commitment to equity for all students, inclusive educational systems maximize the participation of all learners, by making learning opportunities relevant and high-quality. This is only achieved through the systemic exploration...

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  Building Collaboration Between Schools and Parents of English Language Learners: Transcending Barriers, Creating Opportunities

  1/24/09 - Robin Waterman, Beth Harry, Equity Alliance at ASU

  Parents of English Language Learners (ELLs) represent a vital source of support for increased student engagement and achievement; they bring skills, values and knowledge that would benefit both students and teachers. Most importantly, they bring profound commitment and motivation: The majority of the parents of ELLs have come to the United States in order that they and their children will have a “better life.” And many of these families quickly come to believe that supporting their...

• Cultural Responsive Pedagogy and Practice

  1/1/08 - National Center for Culturally Responsive Educational Systems,

  Culturally responsive pedagogy and practice facilitates and supports the achievement of all students. In a culturally responsive classrooms and schools, effective teaching and learning occur in a culturally-supported, learner-centered context, whereby the strengths students bring to school are identified, nurtured, and utilized to promote student achievement.

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  Culturally Responsive Teaching Matters!

  1/26/10 - Kozeski, Elizabeth B., Equity Alliance at ASU

  "In 2000, Professor Geneva Gay wrote that culturally responsive teaching connects students’ cultural knowledge, prior experiences, and performance styles to academic knowledge and intellectual tools in ways that legitimize what students already know. By embracing the sociocultural realities and histories of students through what is taught and how, culturally responsive teachers negotiate classrooms cultures with their students that reflect the communities where students develop and grow...

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  Gender Equity Matters!

  1/15/10 - King Thorius, Kathleen, Equity Alliance at ASU

  Despite remarkable progress along many indicators of equitable access, participation, and outcomes of schooling, there are still persistent, pervasive issues that must be addresses, including continued disparities in access to athletics and academic programs, sexual harassment, hate crimes, and discriminatory treatment of girls and women. This What Matters brief includes strategies for: * Achieving gender equity in access and opportunities to learn * Achieving a gender-balanced...

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  How Multiple Intelligences Theory Can Guide Teachers' Practices: Ensuring Success for Students with Disabilities

  1/5/09 - Edward Garcia Fierros, Equity Alliance at ASU

  This On Point was produced by the National Institute for Urban School Improvement (NIUSI). It is about the Gardner's multiple intelligences (MI) theory and it is implications for Special Education. This On Point applies to all students having Special Education services and families and teachers of people with disabilities. In MI theory, Gardner indicated that the intelligence of children (i.e., thinking, problem solving, and creating) is valued differently depending on the family and...

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  On Time and How to Get More Of It

  1/5/09 - Gwen Meyer, Equity Alliance at ASU

  Today’s schools are striving to meet the challenges of systemic reform and school improvement. It is a big and complicated job. Achieving real, lasting change requires that everyone in schools stops, thinks, and works together to make the kinds of changes that need to occur.

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  Professional Learning for Culturally Responsive Teaching

  1/14/10 - Kathleen A. King, Alfredo J. Artiles, Elizabeth B. Kozleski, Equity Alliance at ASU

  Professional learning for culturally responsive teaching has the potential to address achievement gaps across ethnic groups and disproportionate representation in special education for students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. This Equity In Action has a twofold purpose: (a) to demonstrate the need for rethinking current approaches to professional learning and (b) to provide guidelines for professional learning for culturally responsive teaching, as well as...

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  The Building Leadership Team

  1/5/09 - National Institute for Urban School Improvement, , University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center,, Equity Alliance at ASU

  A Building Leadership Team (BLT) is a school-based group of individuals who work to provide strong organizational process for school renewal and improvement. BLTs orchestrate the work of school professionals, administrators, families, and students through the school improvement process. This process includes the examination of current, successful practices and also those areas that are of concern to the school community. In addition, BLTs plan for progress, achievement, and risk. This...

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  Transition Services for Youth with Disabilities

  1/5/09 - Phil Ferguson, Rick Blumberg, Equity Alliance at ASU

  One way to evaluate the effectiveness of transition services for students with disabilities is to take a look at the outcomes students are achieving. The purpose of this report is to present some important statistics that reveal how students with disabilities appear to be faring; to identify some strategies that appear to result in desirable outcomes; and to suggest some resources for further information about this topic.

• Analyzing the Minority Gap in Achievement Scores: Issues for States and Federal Government

  1/1/03 - Miller, G. Edward

  The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 requires that states demonstrate a reduction in the test score minority gap over time but does not specify what methodology states must use to demonstrate this. The Act also requires that a measure of Adequate Yearly Progress be established by each state expressed in terms of the percent of students who achieve a level of "proficiency" on the state examination. While the most common methods used by states for analyzing the minority gap in test scores over...

• Do Small Classes Reduce the Achievement Gap between Low and High Achievers? Evidence from Project STAR

  1/1/08 - Konstantopoulos, Spyros

  Given that previous findings on the social distribution of the effects of small classes have been mixed and inconclusive, in the present study I attempted to shed light on the mechanism through which small classes affect the achievement of low- and high-achieving students. I used data from a 4-year large-scale randomized experiment (project STAR) to examine the effects of small classes on the achievement gap. The sample consisted of nearly 11,000 elementary school students who participated...

• Closing the Achievement Gap

  1/1/05

  A special section on closing the achievement gap. Articles discuss how educators can help close the literacy gap between ill-served students and their better-served peers, the need for teachers and school library media specialists to understand the importance of connecting students with books that interest them, a case study that examined the strategies used by one teacher to provide students with the support they needed to achieve academic excellence, the need for a pervasive...

• Do Small Classes Reduce the Achievement Gap between Low and High Achievers? Evidence from Project STAR

  1/1/08 - Konstantopoulos, Spyros

  Given that previous findings on the social distribution of the effects of small classes have been mixed and inconclusive, in the present study I attempted to shed light on the mechanism through which small classes affect the achievement of low- and high-achieving students. I used data from a 4-year, large-scale, randomized experiment (project STAR) to examine the effects of small classes on the achievement gap. The sample consisted of nearly 11,000 elementary school students who participated...

• Does equalization litigation effect a narrowing of the gap of value added achievement outcomes among school districts?

  1/1/01 - Peevely, Gary L., Ray, John R.

  A study examined the value added student achievement levels of those school districts that were named as litigants in the Tennessee Small School Systems v. McWherter. Data were obtained by analyzing the mean assessment scores achieved in the Tennessee Value Added Assessment System for litigant and non-litigant districts in the areas of reading, math, language, science, and social studies for the years 1994-1997. The results indicate that although the litigant districts with the infusion of...