According to the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, 14 percent of American youth and young adults possess limited literacy skills. In OUSD, 52 percent of secondary students scored multiple years below their expected reading level on the Scholastic Reading Inventory in fall 2016, with almost one-third reading four or more years below grade level. Because literacy is associated with greater job opportunities and higher incomes, the stakes are high for finding effective ways to accelerate these students. In response, OUSD invested in piloting LLI in secondary schools and partnered with researchers at Mathematica to study the program’s effectiveness with struggling readers in grades 6 to 9. Naihobe Gonzalez, Sophie MacIntyre, and Pilar Beccar-Varela (Mills Teacher Scholars)
Districts show they can shift the focus of the principal supervisor's job from administration to principal support.
The Advanced Placement (AP) program has become a key step on the path to attending a selective college. In the University of California system, for example, more than 90 percent of applicants take AP or honors courses in high school (Geiser and Santelices 2006). However, the College Board estimates that nearly 300,000 high school students with the potential to succeed in an AP course graduate every year without ever taking one. Furthermore, high-achieving students from disadvantaged backgrounds are more likely than other high-achieving students to never take an AP class. Behavioral science researchers have shown that making small changes in the way information is presented can have a large impact on a person’s decision to participate in a program. This issue brief examines how one such change—a personalized message added to a test score report—increased student participation in the AP program. Naihobe Gonzalez
Less than half of the girls living in Burkina Faso in 2004 attended primary school. In the same year, only a quarter of all girls were enrolled in the last grade of primary school.
In this brief, we use data from the Social Security Administration’s Electronic Disability Collect System (EDCS) to examine obesity prevalence among adult applicants to federal disability programs from 2007 through 2013. We compare these trends to those observed for all working-age adults over the same period.
Since the last round of this study in 2011-2012, the Sacramento economy has largely rallied from its long post-recession slump.
The Kauffman School is a public charter school that serves students from low-income neighborhoods in Kansas City, Missouri. This report evaluates the effectiveness of the school at improving student achievement, attendance, and suspension outcomes during its first three years of operation.
In this brief, we use four typical clinical cases to explore the barriers to and facilitators of patients’ decisions at the point of care.
In this article, we document the effects of a 1999 policy change that altered how obesity was to be considered in the disability review process. Tracing changes in obesity recorded as an impairment by Social Security Administration (SSA) adjudicators and the body system of record among applications with recorded obesity during this period, we find that the number of applications with obesity recorded as a primary impairment fell, and the number with obesity as a secondary impairment rose. We also find that initial allowances rates among applications with recorded obesity impairments were lower after the policy change and, when they did occur, allowances were much more likely to be made for medical-vocational reasons than before the policy change.
This document presents estimates of state SNAP participation rates for all eligible people and for the working poor for fiscal year 2013. These estimates can be used to assess recent program performance and focus efforts to improve access.
This issue brief was prepared as part of a small-scale qualitative study funded by the Colorado Health Foundation to convey recent policy developments, remaining unmet needs, and emerging issues in children’s health care coverage and delivery, from the perspective of knowledgeable stakeholders.
