Laurie Brotman

The well-documented achievement gap for low-income, minority children is already present in kindergarten, with students who do not perform at grade level early on unlikely to catch up. ParentCorps is a family-focused, school-based intervention that aims to buffer the adverse effects of poverty on child development by engaging and supporting parents and teachers at school entry. An IES-funded cluster randomized controlled trial (RCT) compared schools randomly assigned to implement ParentCorps...

Ethnic minority students from schools in disadvantaged, urban neighborhoods are at high risk for problems in school including grade retention, academic underachievement, and school dropout. Prospective longitudinal studies indicate that behavior problems in early childhood, especially physical aggression, predict poor academic achievement. This suggests that prevention of aggression in early childhood may lead to higher academic attainment, yet experimental studies addressing this important ...