Confronting Challenges and Engaging Success; Ninth-grade Academies PDF Download

Author: Yolonda L. Sneed
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Career academies
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Background: Too many freshman students struggle during their first year in high school, which can result in their dropping out of school. Ninth grade academies, in which ninth grade students are clustered together for one year, have been one way high schools have sought to support students’ success. Purpose: The purpose of this quantitative mean comparison study was to compare academic achievement at one high school with a ninth-grade academy to a similar school in the same district that does not have a ninth grade academy. Methods: The study used a series of independent samples t test to compare ninth grade students’ average test scores for Algebra I, Biology I, and English I between the two similar campuses over the span of five years. Findings: The schools had similar performance in Algebra for all five years. In Biology, the school with the ninth grade academy outperformed the traditional high school all five years and significantly outperformed the traditional high school in four out of the five years. In English I, the school with the ninth grade academy significantly outperformed the traditional high school all five years since 2013. There was a trend of steady increases over the five-year period, but no increasing in the difference in the scale scores between the two schools for English I. Conclusion: There were significant differences in the mean scores between the two schools over a five year period with the school that implemented the ninth grade academy scoring higher in most years, for most of the subjects. However, the data suggest that the extent to which the ninth grade academy impacted scores on state testing was moderate. The gap in performance between the two schools remained unchanged over a five-year period.

Author: Scott Habeeb
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 0595484727
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 143

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Book Description
Across the country, high school freshmen have the highest rates of failure, discipline problems, and truancy. Defined as the "make it or break it" year, ninth grade can be a trying time for teenagers learning to make their own way in the world. The Ninth Grade Opportunity provides educators with a useful framework to build and implement a team-based Freshman Transition program, ultimately allowing teachers to play an integral role in ensuring every student's success. Scott Habeeb, Ray Moore and Alan Seibert have over 60 years of combined experience as teachers and administrators, and together have compiled a guidebook centered around a teaming approach that empowers teachers to better meet freshmen needs. Based on concepts behind their popular Freshman Transition workshops, the authors share ideas about why and how teaming teachers works and how it can benefit schools. Road maps provide guidance for teachers to learn specifically how to create a program built around key elements such as: Standardized expectations Learning skills Classroom leadership Parent/teacher contact Educators everywhere will benefit from the practical advice, expert insight, and helpful tips that transform the ninth grade problem into The Ninth Grade Opportunity, ensuring a successful transition for every high school student.

Author: Christopher Emdin
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807089516
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
A revolutionary new educational model that encourages educators to provide spaces for students to display their academic brilliance without sacrificing their identities Building on the ideas introduced in his New York Times best-selling book, For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood, Christopher Emdin introduces an alternative educational model that will help students (and teachers) celebrate ratchet identity in the classroom. Ratchetdemic advocates for a new kind of student identity—one that bridges the seemingly disparate worlds of the ivory tower and the urban classroom. Because modern schooling often centers whiteness, Emdin argues, it dismisses ratchet identity (the embodying of “negative” characteristics associated with lowbrow culture, often thought to be possessed by people of a particular ethnic, racial, or socioeconomic status) as anti-intellectual and punishes young people for straying from these alleged “academic norms,” leaving young people in classrooms frustrated and uninspired. These deviations, Emdin explains, include so-called “disruptive behavior” and a celebration of hip-hop music and culture. Emdin argues that being “ratchetdemic,” or both ratchet and academic (like having rap battles about science, for example), can empower students to embrace themselves, their backgrounds, and their education as parts of a whole, not disparate identities. This means celebrating protest, disrupting the status quo, and reclaiming the genius of youth in the classroom.

Author: Martha Abele Mac Iver
Publisher: Harvard Education Press
ISBN: 1682536874
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
Continuous Improvement in High Schools gives educators and policymakers an accessible, actionable framework to address one of the nation's most important educational priorities: improving high school graduation and postsecondary preparedness rates. Martha Abele Mac Iver and Robert Balfanz, national experts in dropout prevention, apply the Carnegie Foundation’s continuous improvement framework to the issue of student success in high school, starting with the critical ninth-grade year. A proven tool for organizational change, the framework provides a systematic structure for examining the root causes of problems and testing possible solutions. Mac Iver and Balfanz draw on their decades of experience working with educators and their deep knowledge of challenges faced by high schools to customize the framework to the high school context. They model the use of improvement science principles such as establishing practical measures, conducting disciplined inquiry, and accelerating learning through networked communities. With real-world examples and ideas for change, the authors show how attention to five key areas can enrich student educational experience and improve high school outcomes. These areas are early warning and intervention systems; family engagement; students’ sense of connectedness to school; social, emotional, and academic development; and teacher instructional practices. The guidance offered in this useful work will enable educators and their collaborating partners to create their own powerful solutions for student success.

Author: Eva Moskowitz
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118239628
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
Strategies for making the schools we need that work for all kids Eva Moskowitz (the founder and CEO of the Success Charter Network in Harlem) and Arin Lavinia offer practical, classroom-tested ideas for dramatically improving teaching and learning. Moskowitz and Lavinia reveal how a charter school in the middle of Harlem, enrolling neighborhood children selected at random, emerged as one of the top schools in New York City and State within three years. The results of the Harlem school were on a par with public schools for gifted students and elite private schools. Describes what can be accomplished when students and adults all work to focus on constant learning and performance improvement; DVD clips can be accessed using a special link included in the book. The Success Academies have been featured in two popular and widely distributed documentaries, Waiting for Superman and The Lottery Details the Success Academies' THINK Literacy curriculum, which produces dramatic results in student's reading and writing skills In addition to providing strategies and lessons for school leaders and teachers, Secrets of the Success Academies also serves as a guide for parents, policymakers, and practitioners who are passionate about closing the academic achievement gap.

Author: W. Norton Grubb
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317256891
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
Principals are responsible for an increasing range of duties in an era of school reform, standardized testing, and more. These responsibilities are even greater in high schools, which are many times larger and more complex than elementary and middle schools. Yet little has been written on the special challenges of high schools and their leadership. This book fills the gap by exploring the challenges specific to high schools, including their size and complexity, the special difficulties in improving instruction, the crucial role of high schools for students' futures, adolescent behavioral issues, and many more. Grubb shows how principals and other leaders can address the complexities of multiple pathways, or efforts to create theme-based trajectories through high school - one of the most promising high school reforms. Looking to the future, he offers alternative ways of preparing professionals for high schools, and the responsibilities of districts for improving high schools and their leadership.

Author: Marie-Andrě Somers
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 102

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Book Description
Ninth Grade Academies (NGAs)--also called Freshman Academies--have attracted national attention as a particularly intensive and promising approach for supporting a successful transition for high school freshmen. An NGA is a self-contained learning community for ninth-graders that operates as a school within a school. NGAs have four core structural components: (1) a designated separate space within the high school, (2) a ninth-grade administrator who oversees the academy, (3) a faculty assigned to teach only ninth-grade students, and (4) teachers organized into interdisciplinary teams that have both students and a planning period in common. The theory of action behind NGAs is that when these components are employed together, they interact to create a more personalized learning environment where ninth-grade students feel less anonymous and more individually supported. This, in turn, should help students succeed in school and stay on track to high school graduation. NGAs have shown promising results when employed as part of a whole-school reform model, but in these cases schools have received external support from a developer to create and sustain them. A growing number of schools and districts have been experimenting with NGAs on their own, but the little research that exists on their effectiveness is limited to anecdotal accounts. This study, which is based on a quasi-experimental research design, examines the effect of NGAs on students' progress toward graduation, their academic achievement, and their behavior in several school districts in Florida. The sample for this study includes 27 high schools that created NGAs between 2001-2002 and 2006-2007, along with 16 comparison high schools that serve ninth-grade students with similar characteristics as students in the NGA schools. As context for understanding the impact findings, this study also looks at the extent to which the key features of the NGA model were implemented in the NGA schools in the study and how this differs from the structures and supports in the comparison schools. The key finding is that the NGAs in this study do not appear to have improved students' academic or behavioral outcomes (credit earning, state test scores, course marks, attendance, suspensions, or expulsions). The findings also suggest that it can be difficult for schools to fully implement the components of the NGA model without expert assistance: Three years after their creation, only half the NGAs in the study had all four structural components of the model in place. Nationally, school districts continue to create NGAs, and recent efforts to implement them have incorporated various enhancements that are intended to strengthen and improve their implementation, but little is known about their effectiveness. Because students' experience in ninth grade is an important predictor of their future success, these efforts to create and improve NGAs should be examined in future studies. Appended are: (1) Technical Information; and (2) Beyond the Sunshine State: Ninth Grade Academies in Other School Districts. ["Helping Students Make the Transition into High School: The Effect of Ninth Grade Academies on Students' Academic and Behavioral Outcomes" was written with Janet Quint.].

Author: Jaana Juvonen
Publisher: Rand Corporation
ISBN: 0833036157
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 181

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Book Description
Young teens undergo multiple changes that seem to set them apart from other students. But do middle schools actually meet their special needs? The authors describe some of the challenges and offer ways to tackle them, such as reassessing the organization of grades K-12; specifically assisting the students most in need; finding ways to prevent disciplinary problems; and helping parents understand how they can help their children learn at home.

Author: Douglas Reeves
Publisher: Corwin Press
ISBN: 1071897462
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 149

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Book Description
Stop apathy in its tracks with the 5 C’s of engagement Disengagement, disenchantment, distress—the three "D’s" of many post-pandemic schools. If we are to find our way back from this brink, every student, teacher, and leader must relearn how to lean in. It’s time to focus, know one another, and stop chasing so many initiatives. It’s time to shake things up so learners want to participate. From faculty meetings to student conferences, casual greetings to grading, you can learn to use practices that most powerfully reflect the Five C’s of Engagement: Connections — feeling known, valued, and tethered to others Conditions — being able to learn in a stable environment in which expectations are high Challenge — engaging in an endeavor knowing your "high jumps" in terms of intellectual and creative risks will be supported Control — the privilege of learning with a balance between ownership and support Collaboration — deepening one’s knowledge and identity as a learner by being skillful at relationship-building Our students are looking to us as the grownups in the room to model what it looks like to belong, believe, and balance high expectations with compassionate support. With Confronting the Crisis of Engagement in hand, you have the guide to make that happen.

Author: Tim Healey
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780918339737
Category : Education, Secondary
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The ninth grade year is a critical juncture in a student¿s academic and social development. It is also a critical and difficult period for parents, as they must learn to approach their ¿children¿ as teenagers ¿ while still maintaining the necessary control and guidance to ensure their teenager¿s directed growth and success. In The Insider¿s Guide to High School, two veteran principals, Tim Healey & Alex Carter, with almost 40 years of combined experience as secondary educators, provide parents with an insider¿s view on how to best prepare, support, and coach their rising ninth graders. In this very approachable and honest book, the authors lay out six steps parents should take to prepare their ninth grade student for success in today¿s high school classroom. Using these steps, the book helps parents and their teenager develop a plan for success, improve communication, and learn to work together for a common goal. As an added bonus, these successful school leaders offer insider¿s advice on how parents can best support their child should they encounter some of the more difficult challenges of high school, such as poor grades, a ¿bad¿ teacher, and even a trip to the principal¿s office. Designed to provide real-world advice and support to those who are preparing to enter the world of high school alongside their child, The Insider¿s Guide to High School is a must read for all new high school parents.