Due to the lack of effectiveness of the punitive school approach toward challenging behaviors (Luiselli, Putnam, Handler, & Feinberg, 2005; Reynolds, Skiba, Graham, Sheras, Conoley, & Garcia-Vazquez, 2006), public schools have searched for an innovative approach to better serve students who are at risk for academic failure and dropout/expulsion. A…

Students are failing and stakeholders are having difficulty identifying exactly what is leading to this failure; in urban schools there is the problem of lack of or little parental involvement which makes the problem of failure of our children more adverse and there is also only a limited amount of research that has focused on gaining an…

This study investigated the past special education programs and services provided to children and youth who later became incarcerated. Participants in this study were inmates from a medium security state correctional facility in the southwest region of the United States. All inmates involved in this study were identified as having a disability and…

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…

Developmental education students make up almost half of the community college population in the United States (Bettinger & Long, 2005). Approximately 42% of first-time freshmen at community colleges must enroll in at least one developmental education course in English, reading and/or math (NCES, 2010). Many developmental education students are…

Ten years have passed since President George W. Bush signed No Child Left Behind (NCLB), making it the educational law of the land. A review of a decade of evidence demonstrates that NCLB has failed badly both in terms of its own goals and more broadly. It has neither significantly increased academic performance nor significantly reduced…

This study examined students who successfully applied for reinstatement after being academically dismissed for the first time in order to discover indicators of future success. This study examined 666 students' appeals filed at the DeVry University Kansas City campus between 2004 and 2009. Binary logistic regression was used to discover if a…

Prior to the mandatory testing and reporting required by the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), school improvement efforts were shown to lack coherence (Newman, Smith, Allensworth, & Bryk, 2001) and often included conflicting programs (Hatch, 2002). Part of the theory of performance-based accountability in general, and NCLB in particular, was…

Technological advances offer new ways and approaches to teaching and learning and have affected traditional methods of instruction and student assessment. Portfolio assessment is one way to document a student's progress over time and has been the subject of considerable research. This mixed method study explored the extent to which portfolio…

Students with Emotional and Behavioral Disabilities (EBD) in the United States are characterized by behavioral deficits that impact their academic performance and social relationships. Students with EBD have lower academic performance in reading and math, more failed courses, higher rates of grade retention, and fewer than fifty percent graduate…

In recent years, the number of students enrolled in alternative schools who are at-risk for academic failure has significantly increased. Students with disabilities, primarily students with emotional and behavioral disabilities and learning disabilities, are increasingly educated in alternative settings. Placement of students in alternative…

The goal of this descriptive study was to investigate the use of decoding strategies, specifically phonemic awareness, alphabetic principle, accuracy and fluency, and vocabulary, to determine if applying the identified decoding strategies would have an effect on the students at-risk for reading failure. The purpose was to determine if these…

There is convincing evidence that many students struggle to learn mathematics proficiently. One plausible contributor to the low math achievement is the quantity and quality of learning opportunities provided in classrooms. These opportunities may fall short of addressing the learning needs of students, especially those at risk for failure in…

Hispanic-American students have the highest high school drop-out rate and as a group are considered to be at-risk for academic failure due to issues of poverty, immigration, language barriers, discrimination, and acculturative stress. This study empirically tested the extent to which cognitive flexibility and planning skills predicted…

"Fundations"[R] is a prevention and early-intervention program designed to help reduce reading and spelling failure. The program is aimed at students in grades K-3 and involves daily 30-minute lessons which focus on carefully-sequenced skills that include print knowledge, alphabet awareness, phonological awareness, phonemic awareness,…