"The Mentoring Toolkit 2.0: Resources for Developing Programs for Incarcerated Youth" provides information, program descriptions, and links to important resources that can assist juvenile correctional facilities and other organizations to design effective mentoring programs for neglected and delinquent youth, particularly those who are…

A quality improvement system (QIS) is an intentional effort to raise the quality of afterschool programming in an ongoing, organized fashion. There are a number of reasons the QIS is gaining popularity. The main reasons community leaders are drawn to improving quality is that they know that 1) higher quality programs will mean better experiences…

Cities around the country are building systems that seek to make the most of public and private resources to provide widespread, high-quality, out-of-school time opportunities. Local officials are leading these efforts because participation in OST programs not only benefits young people but also the cities in which they live, with the potential to…

Few questions in public education discourse benefit as much from research-based evidence as the question of class size--the pursuit of the ideal number of students that should be co-located for any particular period of instruction. But for policymakers, research on class size can be an embarrassment of riches, and much of the research appears to…

To stem the tide of students dropping out, many schools and districts are turning to early warning systems (EWS) that signal whether a student is at risk of not graduating from high school. While some research exists about establishing these systems, there is little information about the actual implementation strategies that are being used across…

This booklet reports on a study of food service functions in Texas schools. The report contains examples taken from previous school reviews and is based on the state Comptroller's instruction that the best practices identified by the Texas School Performance Review team be communicated to all the state's school districts. Some examples present…

Suggesting that creating a report for each school involved in the Reading Recovery program can have a powerful impact, this paper shows the current model of campus reports for the Spring Branch Independent School District, Houston, Texas. The report form described in the paper is continually growing and changing through need and collaboration with…

This paper is a description of an Individualized Bilingual Instruction (IBI) program which was nationally validated by the U.S. Department of Education and listed in their directory of "Educational Programs That Work." It provides information on the technology of the IBI program, the type of curriculum selected and how the staff was…

This report contains materials from the TECHlinx Technical Education Clearinghouse project designed to promote the effective development of the Texas work force by linking individuals and institutions to information and resources focused on work force education. Part 1, an executive summary, reports how the project was successfully established and…

The Strategic Planning Evaluation of Curriculum Assessment of Performance (SPECAP) project was designed by Texas Tech University to assess the implementation of programs by 25 tech prep consortia in Texas. This report describes the most effective tech prep practices discovered by SPECAP through analyses of consortia planning and implementation…

A project was conducted in Texas using an intergenerational approach to literacy instruction. Parents received individualized literacy instruction using the Language Experience Approach, as well as instruction designed to help them encourage literacy skill development in their children. Children and parents also worked together on literacy…