Over the last decade, accountability reform has been at the forefront of the domestic policy agenda. Although the Obama Administration was critical of some elements of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), its policies endorsed high-stakes testing and expanded the scope of the stakes. With the Race to the Top and an NCLB waiver process, the administration…

With years of research focusing on soaring incarceration rates, the phenomena of prisoner reentry has been largely overlooked. The majority of incarcerated people will return to the community setting. In fact, millions of recently released offenders are on some form of community based supervision. Today, recidivism is a problem that plagues…

There is widespread interest in using various statistical inference tools as a part of the evaluations for individual teachers and schools. Evaluation systems typically involve classifying hundreds or even thousands of teachers or schools according to their estimated performance. Many current evaluations are largely based on individual estimates…

Successful change in schools is planned, expected and managed with the objective focused on benefiting the students, not just converting the staff. This investigation is a case study of a public school district that opted to implement curricular change following an examination of the district's performance toward adequate yearly progress. This…

This dissertation investigates the prevailing No Child Left Behind (NCLB) mandate as an effective platform to improve schools. The data compiled for use in this study represented 426 high schools in Pennsylvania and were retrieved from publicly accessible, state-sponsored sources. The statistical methodologies from the Pennsylvania Value-Added…

Since one primary goal of the Commodity Distribution (CD) Program and the Food Stamp (FS) Program is to improve diets of low-income families, this 1969-70 study focused on whether the adequacy of a low-income family's dietary intake was improved by their participation in a food-assistance program. As stated, the adequacy of a family's dietary…

Major areas of concern of Pennsylvania school food service management--student participation, labor cost, food cost, and uses of management information--are analyzed and recommendations are made. The management information study is an analysis of the findings from a six-county sample survey of record keeping practices and personal perceptions of…

INCLUDED IN THIS REPORT ARE SEPARATE EVALUATIONS OF 19 PROJECTS AND FIVE SUBPROJECTS, A DESCRIPTION OF A PROGRAM TO MASS-TEST A CROSS SECTION OF PUPILS FROM TITLE I SCHOOLS, AND THE RESULTS OF AN ACROSS-PROJECT TITLE I SURVEY. SIX OF THE PROJECTS (READING PROGRAM, MODERN MATHEMATICS, SCHOOL-COMMUNITY COORDINATORS, ELEMENTARY ART, COUNSELOR AIDES)…

Farm to school (FTS) programs have been getting more and more attention these days. FTS programs aim to increase the supply of fresh, locally grown farm products served for meals and snacks in K-12 school environments, and tend to incorporate educational and experiential components designed to increase students' understanding of and engagement…