Tag » express

• Neighborhood and School Factors in the School Performance of Immigrants’ Children

  1/1/07 - Pong, Suet-ling, Hao, Lingxin

  This article examines the effects of neighborhoods and schools on the achievement gaps between adolescents of different nativities and ethnicities. We show that neighborhood and school conditions are better for natives' than for immigrants' children, and they are the worst for Hispanic immigrants. Using cross-classified hierarchical models, we find that introducing neighborhood and school characteristics helps to account for the disadvantage of Mexican immigrants' children but to reveal the...

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  On the front lines of schools: Perspectives of teachers and principals on the high school dropout problem

  1/5/09 - Bridgeland, J., Diulio, J., & Balfanz, R.

  This report has documented a mix of hopeful views and challenging statistics concerning how, and how well, those on the front lines of America's schools -- teachers and principals -- understand the nation's high school dropout crisis. Teachers and administrators in public high schools recognize there is a dropout problem, know they are confronted with daunting challenges in classrooms and in schools, and express strong support for reforms to address high dropout rates. Yet, less than...

• Opportunity to Learn and English Learner Achievement: Is Increased Content Exposure Beneficial?

  1/1/08 - Aguirre-Munoz, Zenaida, Boscardin, Christy Kim

  This investigation examined the impact of opportunity to learn content and skills targeted by a writing assessment on the achievement of English learners (ELs), including the potential for differential impact of increased exposure to literary analysis and writing instruction. Results revealed several factors contributing to students' writing performance. Student-level and teacher-level variables were found to significantly contribute to writing performance. Although exposure to writing and...

• PART III: CREATING MULTICULTURAL CLASSROOMS: Under-Prepared Students: Essentials beyond Academics

  1/1/07 - Ford, Theron N., Glimps, Blanche, Giallourakis, Angie

  Teacher education programs continue to struggle with preparing highly qualified teachers ready to meet the academic, cultural, exceptionality and linguistic challenges, which are increasingly the reality of American's classrooms. Despite increased academic rigor in such programs, many emerging teachers are still ill prepared to each effectively students from cultural and racial backgrounds different from their own. The article asserts that this is due in part to a lack of an appropriate...

• Poverty and educational achievement: why do children from low-income families tend to do less well at school?

  1/1/07 - West, Anne

  There is an achievement gap between children from poor family backgrounds and others; this is not unique to the UK, but found in all other countries of the OECD. This article examines the reasons why children from poorer backgrounds do not, on average, do as well academically at school as those from more advantaged backgrounds. It argues that the family, income and material resources are highly significant, although schools also play an important role. Possible implications for policy are...

• Powerful Pedagogy: Learning Communities at Historically Black Colleges and Universities

  1/1/08 - Shapiro, Nancy S.

  A recent deluge of national studies and reports warns the United States that our future hangs in the balance because our educational system is failing our society. These studies cite projections that American competitiveness is at risk because we have failed to address a growing demographic inevitability—that the segment of the population that is growing the fastest is comprised of those students who are most at risk in our educational system. An expanding body of research (including the...

• Preschool Antecedents of Mathematics Achievement of Latinos: The Influence of Family Resources, Early Literacy Experiences, and Preschool Attendance

  1/1/07 - Lopez, Edward M., Gallimore, Ronald, Garnier, Helen

  Seventy-three Latino middle school students participated in a longitudinal study of the preschool antecedents of their mathematics achievement. Path analysis indicated that family resources (parents' educational level, occupation, and income) predicted home literacy activities, which predicted combined early Spanish literacy and English language proficiencies at kindergarten entry, which predicted elementary mathematics achievement, which in turn predicted middle school mathematics...

• Pushing Past the Achievement Gap: An Essay on the Language of Deficit

  1/1/07 - Ladson-Billings, Gloria

  Despite the intense focus on the achievement gap that exists between African American, Latino, and other students of color and their White counterparts, the achievement gap discourse keeps us locked in the deficit paradigm. This article challenges us to look at the inherent fallacies of the achievement gap discourse and place students' academic struggles in the larger context of social failure including health, wealth, and funding gaps that impede their school success. [ABSTRACT FROM...

• Race, inequality and educational accountability: the irony of 'No Child Left Behind'

  1/1/07 - Darling-Hammond, Linda

  The No Child Left Behind Act, the major education initiative of the Bush Administration, was intended to raise educational achievement and close the racial/ethnic achievement gap. Its strategies include focusing schools' attention on raising test scores, mandating better qualified teachers and providing educational choice. Unfortunately, the complex requirements of the law have failed to achieve these goals, and have provoked a number of unintended negative consequences which frequently harm...

• Race, School Achievement, and Educational Inequality: Toward a Student-Based Inquiry Perspective

  1/1/07 - Wiggan, Greg

  Over the past four decades, there have been numerous discussions on student achievement and school failure. Within this time, the debate over the causes and consequences of racial differences in achievement has been at the heart of the nation's social and political life. The author discusses the major developments in achievement research over the past century and examines the foremost explanations given for racial differences in school performance, namely, genetic deficiency, social class...

• Recursive Processes in Self-Affirmation: Intervening to Close the Minority Achievement Gap

  1/1/09 - Cohen, Geoffrey L., Garcia, Julio, Purdie-Vaughns, Valerie, Apfel, Nancy, Brzustoski, Patricia

  A 2-year follow-up of a randomized field experiment previously reported in Science is presented. A subtle intervention to lessen minority students' psychological threat related to being negatively stereotyped in school was tested in an experiment conducted three times with three independent cohorts (N = 133, 149, and 134). The intervention, a series of brief but structured writing assignments focusing students on a self-affirming value, reduced the racial achievement gap. Over 2 years, the...

• Reducing the Gap: Success for All and the Achievement of African American Students

  1/1/06 - Slavin, Robert E., Madden, Nancy A.

  Success for All is a comprehensive reform model that uses cooperative learning, tutoring, family support services, and extensive professional development to help high-poverty schools succeed with their students. This article reviews research on Success for All with African American students, focusing on evidence that Success for All reduces the achievement gap between African American and White students. More than 40 studies, including a national randomized experiment, have found positive...

• Reducing the Racial Achievement Gap: A Social-Psychological Intervention

  1/1/06 - Cohen, Geoffrey L., Garcia, Julio, Apfel, Nancy, Master, Allison

  Two randomized field experiments tested a social-psychological intervention designed to improve minority student performance and increase our understanding of how psychological threat mediates performance in chronically evaluative real-world environments. We expected that the risk of confirming a negative stereotype aimed at one's group could undermine academic performance in minority students by elevating their level of psychological threat. We tested whether such psychological threat could...

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  Responding to your Child's Bite

  1/18/09 - Center on the Social and Emotional Foundations for Early Learning,

  Many toddlers and young children bite. Developmentally, most toddlers don’t have enough words to express how they are feeling. They primarily rely on sounds and actions to communicate what they are thinking and feeling. Biting is one of the ways toddlers express their needs, desires, or feelings. While biting might be very frustrating, your child is not biting purposefully annoy you or hurt anyone. Your child might be biting to say, “I’m scared,” “People are crowding me,” or...

• School racial composition and academic achievement: the case of Hmong LEP students in the USA

  1/1/08 - Lee, Moosung, Madyun, Na'im

  The existence of the achievement gap is more than just a black-white issue; contrary to stereotypes, it is a concern within Asian homes. Hmong students underachieve in comparison with many East Asian students. Traditional cultural practices and poverty have been identified as explanatory factors. Our data suggest that a more critical factor might be within-school segregation. Utilising a racial exposure statistic, it was found that the more diverse a school became, the higher the achievement...

• Secondary Education Systemic Issues: Addressing Possible Contributors to a Leak in the Science Education Pipeline and Potential Solutions

  1/1/05 - Young, Hollie

  To maintain the legacy of cutting edge scientific innovation in the United States our country must address the many pressing issues facing science education today. One of the most important issues relating to science education is the under-representation of African Americans and Hispanics in the science, technology, and engineering workforce. Foreshadowing such under-representation in the workforce are the disproportionately low rates of African American and Hispanic students attaining...