The authors report on an exploratory pilot project implemented in a large city on the U.S.-Mexico border. The project focuses on a curricular design in a secondary school where beginning-level English as a second language students are taught English language arts in Spanish. The researchers sought to determine whether these students made greater…

Statewide exit examinations play an important role in discussions on school effectiveness. Referring to educational governance concepts, this paper presumes a relation between varying organizational structures of statewide examinations across states, and heterogeneous effects on school actors. It is assumed that their ability to affect work in…

There are significant signs of progress in California's schools, in spite of the tremendous challenges they face. Trends across multiple measures of student performance are fairly consistent: all students are doing better, or at least holding steady, during a time when the system is serving a larger and more diverse population of children. For…