The California Association for Bilingual Education (CABE), Los Angeles, Santa Clara and San Bernardino County Offices of Education and the Wexford Institute, a non-profit evaluation and research educational agency have partnered to implement Project 2-INSPIRE in chronically under-performing public schools within 14 school districts across California. This model was developed and piloted by CABE in 16 PI elementary schools in a five year study documenting significant increased achievement and narrowed achievement gap between limited English proficient students and their English-proficient peers. Seven of 14 school districts to be served by this project include high schools, thereby documenting how improved achievement increases PI high school graduation rates, college and career readiness. All targeted PI schools and districts serve high concentrations of limited English proficient and low-income students. A quasi-experimental design will randomly select PI schools from their respective district’s pool of identified of Title 1 Program Improvement schools and matched control schools. Project INSPIRE’s previous pilot study findings indicate that intensive parent engagement in diversity-responsive Family-School-Community Partnerships lead to statistically significant increased academic achievement among traditionally under-performing students whose parents participated in Project INSPIRE when compared to their peers whose parents did not. Targeted students’ increased rate and level of achievement are closing the achievement gap between themselves and adequately performing peers in PI and adequately performing schools.
To learn more, contact Maria Quezada.
