TO:                  All Staff

FROM:            Michelle J. Walker, Chief Accountability Officer

                        Tom Watkins, Director

                           Research, Evaluation, and Assessment

                        Steve Schellenberg, Assistant Director

                           Research, Evaluation, and Assessment

RE:                  SOTW--The Family:  America’s Smallest School

This study updates the "Parsing the Achievement Gap" research that ETS reported on in 2003. The authors describe one of their key findings as follows:

            "The analysis provided here uses four family/home factors that previous research has shown to be linked to student achievement. To some degree, each is likely to be related to the others: single-parent families, parents reading to young children every day, hours spent watching television, and the frequency of school absences.  Together, these four factors account for about two-thirds of the large differences among states in National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) eighth-grade reading scores.”

Please click attached file for full study.

 America'sSmallestSchool