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Motivating today's adolescents to read is a challenge. This article discusses the kinds of literacy instructional practices that leverage what we know about adolescent motivation. It also reviews several evidence-based literacy interventions designed to engage and motivate adolescent readers that can potentially lead to improvements in student reading motivation and academic outcomes. [This paper will be published in "Phi Delta Kappan."]

District leaders have invested widely in the creation of parent portals, but have paid less attention to ensuring that they are achieving their purpose in providing information that parents can use in supporting their children's academic success. This study, based on qualitative field note data from a larger four-year study of a continuous improvement initiative focused on improving family engagement during the transition from middle grades to high school, identifies both the challenges families face in using the online parent portal and the challenges school leaders face in: (a) ensuring that the portal is a useful tool to families; and (b) communicating information to families about using the portal effectively. This article suggests the need for district leaders, principals, teachers, and other school staff to reflect systematically on the design and purposes of a parent portal, and ways to make the portal a useful tool for families to monitor students' academic progress and help to improve students' grades. It also provides recommendations for how school leaders can apply a continuous improvement approach to increase the number of families that access the portal regularly. [This paper was published in "Middle School Journal" v52 n1 p14-22 Jan 2021 (EJ1281653).]

This study evaluates a "nudge letter" to parents intervention designed to reduce chronic absenteeism among students in one urban district. Using a regression discontinuity design (RDD), it estimates the impact of the intervention on improving student attendance. The forcing variable for the RDD was 2016-17 attendance rate, with a "threshold" of a 0.90 attendance rate (missing 10% of days). Analyses established demographic equivalence of students in the 0.88 to 0.92 baseline attendance bandwidth. Although the overall impact of the intervention on attendance change between Fall 2016 and Fall 2017 (first-quarter attendance) was small and non-significant (ES 0.09, p=0.20), the effect size for middle school students (0.34, p=0.044) was "substantively important" by What Works Clearinghouse standards. The effect of the intervention on the full year's attendance rate was not significant. [This paper will be published in "Education and Urban Society."]

In 2011 Baltimore City Schools submitted a successful proposal for an Investing in Innovations (i3) grant to offer a three year (2012-2014) summer program designed to expose rising sixth through eighth grade students to VEX robotics. The i3-funded Middle School Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Summer Learning Program was part of a larger Baltimore City STEM summer learning program entitled "Create the Solution" in 2012 and "22nd Century Pioneers" in 2013 and 2014. The five-week summer program offered in 2012, 2013, and 2014 consisted of a half-day of instruction in mathematics and science and a half-day of enrichment activities. The robotics workshop taught students the fundamentals of building robots and provided time for teams to build their own robots and participate in competitions. The larger program offered different enrichment activities such as sports or arts. This report addresses research questions regarding the program's: (1) implementation fidelity; (2) performance goals; (3) impact on student attendance and mathematics achievement outcomes; (4) impact on student aspirations for college, studying STEM subjects in college, and pursuing STEM careers; and (5) impact on measures of teacher effectiveness. The following includes a summary for each: (1) Implementation Fidelity: Instruction in mathematics and robotics was implemented with fidelity all three program years. Implementation fidelity was lower for the professional development in robotics and mathematics components of the program because teacher attendance rates did not meet the thresholds set by City Schools; (2) Enrollment Goals: Most program enrollment goals were not met. Enrollment in the i3-funded program was 193 students in 2012 (goal 400), 384 in 2013 (goal 500), and 386 in 2014 (goal 600). The program sought to enroll 80% low-performing students in mathematics each year, but fell significantly short of this goal despite the district's efforts to reach out to these students. In addition, the program goal of enrolling at least 50% female participants was not met. The program also sought to have at least 80% of students attend at least 70% of the time (17 of the 24 program days), but only 55% of students attended at that rate. The program did meet its goals for recruiting minority (at least 95%) and high poverty students (at least 80%) each year; (3) Program Impacts on Attendance: Found a significant program effect on attendance in the year following the 2012 program. Program students had average attendance rates of 1.4 percentage points higher than the comparison group the year following the program (97.0% vs. 95.6%). An even larger significant program effect for low-achieving students' attendance was found in the year following the 2012 program (96.4% vs. 93.8%). The 2013 program students had slightly but not significantly higher attendance rates than their matched comparison students in the year following the program. The authors also also examined whether there was still a program effect on attendance a year later (2013-14) for the Summer 2012 participants. Program participants had average attendance rates of 1.5 percentage points higher than comparison students (95.2% vs. 93.7%). Among the low-achieving students the attendance difference was 2.4 percentage points (93.6% for program students vs. 91.2% for comparison students). These effects were not statistically significant; (4) Program Impacts on Mathematics Achievement: There were no program effects on mathematics achievement for either the 2012 or 2013 programs; (5) Program Impacts on Student Aspirations: There was no evidence from student survey data that the robotics program had a positive effect on student aspirations to attend college, study STEM subjects in college, or pursue a STEM career for either the 2013 or 2014 programs; and (6) Program Impacts on Teacher Effectiveness: Analyses based on mean instructional effectiveness scores from Spring 2013 and Fall 2013 on the nine components of the district's teacher evaluation tool examined whether teachers who received the summer professional development in 2013 made gains in instructional effectiveness. The difference between program teachers' effectiveness scores before and after the professional development was not statistically significant. Data were not available to examine differences between program teachers and a comparable group of teachers who did not receive the summer professional development. The following are appended: (1) Implementation Fidelity; (2) Performance Goals; and (3) Methodology.

Attendance is probably the most fundamental behavioral indicator of student engagement with school. Though many students fall off-track to success for the first time in ninth grade, poor attendance patterns often begin increasing in middle school and become worse in high school. Missing school during the secondary grades can often be traced to low levels of motivation. As Eccles (2008) has so aptly summarized the crux of the motivation issue, it often boils down to two main questions in students' minds about what happens in school: "Can I do the task?" And "Do I want to do the task?" (Eccles & Midgely, 1989; Meece, 2003). Recent discussions of noncognitive factors affecting academic performance have emphasized the importance of developing an academic mindset to influence academic behaviors such as attendance and exerting effort in class and homework assignments (Farrington et al., 2013). The process of helping students to internalize these beliefs can occur not only in the core academic classroom, but also in elective activities like robotics that build a sense of competence and value in academic pursuits. Given the salience of attendance as a predictor of student achievement outcomes, additional research on effective means of increasing attendance for at-risk students is particularly important. This paper focuses on the following research question: Did the five week STEM robotics summer learning program have a positive impact on the following year's attendance rate of middle school students (compared to a matched sample of students who did not receive any of the district's summer programs)? The focus of this study is a STEM Robotics Summer Learning Program funded by the U.S. Department of Education's Investing in Innovation (i3) program in a development award. The primary goal of this five-week summer program implemented by the school district was to provide additional out of school time focused on mathematics instruction and robotics so that enrolled students could increase their mathematics grade-level aptitude by the end of the program and develop interest in technology and STEM college majors and careers. The robotics component was expected to increase student engagement (including attendance) and perception of the relevance of mathematics, leading to increased student effort and math achievement. Despite limitations, the findings of this study emphasize the importance of investigating the potential impact of out-of-school programs on school-focused engagement. As Lawson and Lawson (2013) argue, research on school engagement needs to move beyond the traditional classroom and school to include out-of-school and community-focused activities. Tables are appended.

This study of high school outcomes in the Baltimore City Public Schools builds on substantial prior research on the early warning indicators of dropping out. It sought to investigate whether the same variables that predicted a non-graduation outcome in other urban districts--attendance, behavior problems, and course failure--were also significant predictors of non-graduation in Baltimore. The study specifically probed the relationship between eighth- and ninth-grade early warning indicators as predictors of graduation outcomes, as well as the relationship between ninth-grade indicators and college enrollment outcomes. The results are divided into three parts. Parts I and II present descriptive analyses of the data, including frequencies, cross-tabulations, means, and other descriptive summaries that show the relationship between various student behaviors/early warning indicators (such as absenteeism, GPA, or course failures) and high school graduation and college enrollment outcomes. Part III then reports the results of multi-level modeling analyses of the data, wherein the relative impact of eighth- and ninth-grade early warning indicators on high school graduation and college enrollment outcomes are presented. Appended are: (1) Data Definitions and Missing Data; and (2) Technical Results. (Contains 12 figures, 7 tables, and 51 footnotes.)

This report paints a collective portrait of the Baltimore City Schools dropouts of 2008-09 to summarize some of the commonalities that join their individual stories together. After examining the surface level demographic characteristics of these dropouts, researchers probed more deeply into their behavioral characteristics in the years preceding the dropout event. The task of recovering dropouts and raising the graduation rate in Baltimore City will require addressing the behavioral factors identified in previous research that push students off-track to graduation, particularly chronic absenteeism, suspensions, and course failure. Once students get off-track in ninth grade, bringing them to successful high school graduation is extremely difficult. This descriptive study of dropout characteristics should motivate a district-and school-level focus on addressing early warning indicators in the middle grades to prevent dropout outcomes before they occur. The report includes an appendix: Recovery Options for Dropouts, Based on Age and Credits Short of Graduation Status.

The ambitious goal set by Colorado's governor to address the state's dropout problem is a model for the nation. Helping thousands of young people to receive their high school diplomas instead of leaving school without them is a crucial step in improving the quality of life for all Colorado residents. Accomplishing this goal will require focused attention on dropout prevention, intervention, and recovery, particularly in the schools and districts with large numbers of dropouts. The research reported here was conducted as a foundational analysis for the work of the Colorado Graduates Initiative (CGI), a partnership of several education advocacy organizations and other non-profit organizations seeking to assure that districts and schools succeed in accomplishing the goal of cutting the state's dropout rate in half within the next ten years. This research focused first on the statewide distribution of dropouts, and then on five of the districts having some of the largest number of dropouts, using both aggregate school level data from the Colorado Department of Education and individual level administrative data from each of the five districts. The report begins with an analysis of the concentration of dropouts within the state of Colorado, and a brief review of what research has shown about predictors of a dropout outcome. It provides an analysis of the demographic and behavioral characteristics of dropouts from the five Colorado districts as well as early warning indicators among students in middle school and ninth grade. The report concludes with recommendations for steps that districts and schools could potentially take to identify and address these early warning signals. The recommendations include specific suggestions for an integrated dropout prevention framework, using a multi-tiered public health framework with an early warning system and tiered interventions to increase attendance and reduce both problem behavior and course failure. In short, this report presents several keys to addressing Colorado's graduation challenge. (Contains 13 figures, 6 tables and 10 footnotes.) [For the "Advancing the "Colorado Graduates" Agenda: Understanding the Dropout Problem and Mobilizing to Meet the Graduation Challenge. [Executive Summary]," see ED539110.]

Dropping out of school--and the concomitant failure to graduate with a high school diploma--form a "silent epidemic" in the United States today. "Nationally, research puts the graduation rate between 68 and 71 percent, which means that almost one-third of all public high school students in America fail to graduate" or drop out (Bridgeland, DiIulio & Morison, 2006, p. 1). The state of Colorado is no exception. A 2004 study by the Urban Institute Educational Policy Center pegs the national graduation rate at 68%; Colorado's graduation rate comes in at 69% (Swanson, 2004b, pp. 38, 48). Both nationally and in Colorado, the differences between the graduation rates for young women and young men are also similar: nationally, 72% of girls graduate, as opposed to 64% of boys, while in Colorado, the female graduation rate is 72.9% as compared to a 65.1% for male students (Swanson, 2004, pp. 38, 48). The purpose of this exploratory study is to begin to probe what might be called almost half of the dropout problem in Colorado. What makes girls drop out? Conversely, what might work to keep them going to school? (Contains 4 figures, 7 tables, and 12 footnotes.)

Despite decades of school improvement initiatives, many young people still do not cross the finish line of secondary education with the credential that signifies success--a high school diploma. Thousands of young people give up on school and on themselves, or schools give up on them. Without effective support from schools, communities, and families, many at-risk students fall through the cracks and eventually drop out. Persistent high dropout rates are particularly troublesome in large, urban high schools and in poor and rural districts. Young people who drop out of school have few prospects for earning a living wage, which takes an economic and societal toll that cannot be sustained in a competitive nation. Recently, stemming the tide on these--dropout factories, where upwards of 50 percent of students do not graduate, has become a national, state, and local priority. In its Fiscal Year 2010 budget request, the Obama administration proposes a $50 million High School Graduation Initiative to promote innovative strategies for increasing high school graduation rates. This report summarizes the research on "why" students drop out of school, explains the research implications for "how" to create an integrated dropout prevention strategy, and highlights an innovative pilot project that yielded results in a matter of months--a "how-to" example that works. (Contains 8 figures and 3 footnotes.)

This brief report provides an update to the analysis of five cohorts of new teachers in the Baltimore City Public School System (1999-2000, 2000-01, 2001-02, 2002-03, 2003-04). Presented here are updated retention figures using Baltimore City Public School System (BCPSS) teacher data for 2004-05, comparing teachers with different certification status: those with full professional certification, teachers in alternative certification programs (Teach for America [TFA], the Baltimore City Teaching Residency Program [BCTR], and Project SITE SUPPORT [PSS]), and conditionally (formerly provisionally) certified teachers who were not participating in alternative certification programs. Findings included: (1) On average, teachers in alternative certification programs had higher retention rates than either conditionally or regularly certified teachers for each of their first five years of teaching in BCPSS. (2) For multiple cohorts there was considerable attrition among alternative certification program participants between Years 2 and 3, due perhaps to the fact that TFA teachers completed their commitment to the school system. Nonetheless, teachers in alternative certification programs typically had higher than district average retention rates in Years 3 and 4. (3) Three-year retention rates were generally similar between TFA and regularly certified teachers, with an anomalous drop in TFA retention for the 2002-03 cohort that lowered the overall 3-year retention rate. (By cohort, TFA teachers had 50%, 45%, 49%, and 31% three-year retention rates compared to 44%, 50%, 51%, and 44% for fully certified teachers.). (4) Retention rates for Project Site Support teachers remained considerably higher than those for both conditionally and regularly certified teachers even after year 4. Because of the high attrition rate of TFA teachers after three years, the overall retention rate for all alternative certification program teachers was similar to those of conditionally and regularly certified teachers by year 4. Baltimore is not unlike other urban districts, where teacher recruitment has proved to be a challenge (e.g., Neild, Useem, Travers, & Lesnick, 2003; Neild, Useem, & Farley, 2005). Though Ingersoll (2001) argues that teacher turnover in urban districts is actually lower than in small private schools, new teacher retention continues to be a major issue for Baltimore. While considerable debate continues to rage over teacher certification and alternative certification (e.g., Darling-Hammond, 1994, 2000, 2002; Darling-Hammond, Berry, & Thoreson, 2001; Decker, Mayer, & Glazerman, 2004; Goldhaber & Brewer, 2000; Goldhaber & Brewer, 2001; Hess, 2001; Laczko-Kerr & Berliner, 2002; Walsh, 2001), recruiting fully certified teachers to urban districts like Baltimore is particularly difficult. During such a challenging period for the Baltimore City Public School System, alternatively certified teachers have not only filled the gap but also have stayed on to become certified and continue teaching in the district. It is not yet possible with BCPSS data to examine the "effectiveness" of alternatively certified teachers in helping to raise student achievement. Recent studies of alternative certification using data from other districts have found mixed results, with some studies (e.g., Decker, Mayer, & Glazerman, 2004; Kane, Rockoff, & Staiger, 2006; Raymond, Fletcher, & Luque, 2001) more positive than others (e.g., Darling-Hammond, Holtzman, Gatlin, & Heilig, 2005; Laczlo-Kerr & Berliner, 2002). In an era when recruiting fully certified teachers is extremely difficult, however, it is important not to underemphasize the findings of positive effects of alternative certification compared to uncertified teachers.

This literature review examines the functional tasks of the school district central office and the internal dynamics of relations between the central office and district schools (with their principals, teachers, and students). It builds on previous reviews of the role of school boards and superintendents. The review begins by analyzing studies of the central office more or less chronologically (since the late 1970s). Next, it examines the more recent studies by type of study, and then it proceeds to a more functional analysis of the roles of the central office with respect to improving instruction and student achievement, focusing on: decision-making about curriculum and instruction; supporting good instructional practice (high reliability recruitment of principals and teachers, professional development for principals, professional development for teachers, physical capital/material resources, and linkages between professional development and achievement); and linking evaluation research to district policymaking. The review concludes by outlining the kinds of research that still need to occur to further understanding of how the district, and in particular, central office activity, influences student achievement. (Contains 178 references.) (SM)

This 4-year study examined implementation of the Baltimore Curriculum Project (BCP) in six Baltimore City public schools. BCP used a combination of direct instruction (DI) and core knowledge as its reform curriculum. Each school was demographically matched with a similar, within-district school. Two cohorts of students were followed throughout the 4 years (students who were in either kindergarten or grade 2 during 1996-97). Interviews with principals and DI coordinators and focus groups with teachers were conducted each year to gauge staff perceptions of the innovation. In the first 3 years, classroom observations were made in BCP schools. Overall, DI curriculum and instructional methods were implemented in BCP schools, though implementation did not proceed at the desired rate in kindergarten until year 4. Implementation of core knowledge was not envisioned to begin until year 3 and proceeded more slowly than DI implementation. Teachers expressed positive views of both DI and core knowledge, though they had some frustrations. Achievement tests data indicated mixed results for students, depending on subject, grade level, and school. Results were most positive for mathematics computation. DI students made the most significant improvements in mathematics computation and reading. An appendix includes a comparison of BCP and control schools. (Contains 50 references.) (SM)

Recognizing the importance of both keeping middle school students engaged and improving their math skills, Baltimore City Public Schools (City Schools) developed a summer school STEM program involving not only math and science instruction but also the experience of building a robot and competing with those robots in a city-wide tournament. Underlying the intervention's logic model was the belief that hands-on activities like robotics can build a sense of competence and value in academic pursuits that will increase student engagement and achievement. The results of this study suggest that continued investment in high-interest elective activities such as robotics could have a significant impact on helping students remain engaged in school, who otherwise might begin to disengage and thus lower their chances for successful transition into college and career.