Center for Research on the Education of Students Placed at Risk: Report #62

The Center for Research on the Education of Students Placed at Risk (CRESPAR) was established in 1994 and continued until 2004. It was a collaboration between Johns Hopkins University and Howard University. CRESPAR’s mission was to conduct research, development, evaluation, and dissemination of replicable strategies designed to transform schooling for students who were placed at risk due to inadequate institutional responses to such factors as poverty, ethnic minority status, and non-English-speaking home background.This study reports the results of a four-year multimethod evaluation of the implementation of the Baltimore Curriculum Project (BCP) in six Baltimore City schools. BCP used a combination of the Direct Instruction (DI) program and Core Knowledge as its reform curriculum. Each of the six schools was demographically matched with a similar, within-district school so that it would have a reasonable control against which it could be compared. Two cohorts of students in the BCP and the control schools were followed through the course of the evaluation—students who were in either kindergarten or grade two during the 1996–97 school year (primarily in third and fifth grades, respectively, during 1999–2000). Interviews with principals and DI coordinators and focus groups with teachers were conducted each of the four years of the study to gauge BCP-school staff perceptions of the ongoing innovation.Grant (No. R-117-40005) from the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), U.S. Department of Educatio