This paper examines the long-term impact of the 1993 Massachusetts Education Reform Act (MERA) and the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) on postsecondary education outcomes, with a focus on historically underserved students. MERA aimed to improve educational standards and close achievement gaps through the introduction of MCAS,…

We examine how different measures of teacher quality are related to students' long-run trajectories. Comparing teachers' "test-based" value-added to "nontest" value-added -- based on contributions to student absences and grades -- we find that test and nontest value-added have similar effects on the average quality of colleges…

This article explores how college expectations in 8th grade change by 10th grade, and if students realize the expectations for a given level of college from 8th and 10th grade, in light of the "college for all" ethos. This study is based on administrative data from 235,875 public school students in Massachusetts from 2006 to 2016. Using…

This Framework is built upon the foundation of the 2003 and 1997 "Massachusetts History and Social Science Curriculum Frameworks." Based in research on effective practice, it represents the contributions of members of the History and Social Science Curriculum Framework Review Panel, scholars who served as Content Advisors, and the more…

This article describes research results based on multiple years of experimentation and real-world experience with an adaptive tutoring system named Wayang Outpost. The system represents a novel adaptive learning technology that has shown successful outcomes with thousands of students, and provided teachers with valuable information about students'…

The Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (Department) created the grades 1-12 Early Warning Indicator System (EWIS) in response to district interest in the Early Warning Indicator Index (EWII) that the Department previously created for rising grade 9 students. Districts shared that the EWII data were helpful, but also…

Background: Cluster-randomized experiments that assign intact groups such as schools or school districts to treatment conditions are increasingly common in educational research. Such experiments are inherently multilevel designs whose sensitivity (statistical power and precision of estimates) depends on the variance decomposition across levels.…

This year the Center on Education Policy analyzed data on the achievement of different groups of students in two distinct ways. First, it looked at grade 4 test results to determine whether the performance of various groups improved at three achievement levels--basic and above, proficient and above, and advanced. Second, it looked at gaps between…