Extending the branches of the Giving Tree: A community-university partnership to examine the impact of summer school support for disadvantaged youth

Drawing upon Ernest Boyer’s (1996) conception of the scholarship of engagement, this case study systematically integrates service and research and shows how quality empirical research can make meaningful differences in children’s lives. Proposed by The Giving Tree, a non-profit community organization located in metropolitan Green Bay, Wisconsin, this collaborative community-university project addresses issues of access to educational resources for economically disadvantaged youth. Using de-identified 2010 spring and fall test scores, this research assesses how summer gains and losses vary by student socio-economic status and summer school attendance. The application of social science expertise provides quality assessment measures for programmatic implementation and legitimates community organizations attempting to foster philanthropic support which prize empirical measures of assessment and evaluation

Leveraging University-School District Research Partnerships: Exploring the Longitudinal Effects of an Early Kindergarten Transition Program

With increasingly tight budgets, many public school districts lack research personnel to evaluate program efficacy or investigate best practices that raise student achievement. We highlight an example of a successful university-district partnership that offers district-driven research support while providing opportunities for practitioner-scholars to learn first-hand how to perform rigorous evaluation work. This article details the Early Kindergarten Transition program evaluation study conducted by a university-district partnership as well as testimony from district leadership on the utility of the research deliverables and long-term benefits of the research collaboration

Achievement Growth in K-8 Catholic Schools Using NWEA Data

Using a national sample of kindergarten to eighth grade students from Catholic and public schools who took MAP Growth assessments, we examine achievement growth over time between sectors. Our findings suggest that while Catholic school students score higher in math and reading than public school students on average, they also enter each school year at a higher level. Public school students close this gap to some degree during the school year. Additionally, these patterns varied by age and subject. Catholic school students in the earlier grades show less growth in both reading and math during the academic year compared to their public school peers, but in middle school growth patterns in math were comparable across sectors

New Patterns of Segregation: Latino and African American Students in Metro Atlanta High Schools

Beth Tarasawa writes about the changing patterns of school segregation for Latino and African American students in Atlanta

Positionality in Teaching: Implications for Advancing Social Justice

Teaching classes concerned with justice and equity led us to understand that we must model justice and equity in all of our work. In order to ask students to be vulnerable in talking about how they have been exposed to, and impacted by, society’s messages about race, gender, and sexual identity, we have a responsibility to first demonstrate that vulnerability ourselves. Thus, our work is more about “being” than “doing.” Modeling honest self-assessment allows us to ask students to be reflective about their relationship to power, privilege, and oppression. A reader hesitating to do this work should remember that analyzing power imbalances, misshapen structures, and hidden assumptions are familiar critical thinking tasks. If talking about our own mistakes, struggles, and fears is central to the curriculum, that lessens the fear of making mistakes in a new endeavor and even normalizes and values these moments. Just as students benefit from a new openness to authentic stories of others, and a deeper understanding of their own stories, so are teachers’ lives enriched thereby