ABSTRACT
This chapter examines three types of school resources that might offer more promising prospects for increasing the achievement of low-achieving students. These promising resources are derived from three different studies, none of which have been discussed (in detail) in the preceding chapters. The first is a meta-analysis of interventions for low socioeconomic status (SES) students; the second is a school restructuring experiment in a large city; and the third is an expert study for another adequacy case in Tennessee.
The strongest effect for the low-SES meta-analysis is one-on-one tutoring found in 36 separate studies. A re-analysis requiring a validity threshold of 0.80 reduces the median effect size to 0.24, but this remains one of the strongest effect sizes for a school resource found in this book. For the Houston school restructuring experiment, an effect size of 0.25 was found for elementary math; no significant effect was found for reading. Finally, for the Tennessee adequacy case, an effect size of 0.18 was found for teacher value-added scores for low-income students; this is the strongest effect found for a teacher characteristic in this book.
