The debate about the performance of US students on international assessments of educational achievement routinely fails to account for one consistently stark result: US achievement is bifurcated between a group of high-performing Asian and white students and an exceptionally low-performing group of black and Hispanic students. By summarizing…

The core work of the National Center on Scaling Up Effective Schools consists of four stages: identifying practices of highly effective high schools, designing interventions and transfer of practices, evaluating the intervention's implementation and effects, and evaluating implementation at scale. The purpose of this report is to describe the…

This technical report provides a summary of feedback from teachers, administrators, and support personnel who used the easyCBM progress monitoring and benchmark assessment system during school year 2009/2010. Data were gathered from semi-structured focus groups conducted during the 2010 easyCBM August Institute at the University of Oregon. Results…

The "PISA 2009 Technical Report" describes the methodology underlying the PISA 2009 survey. It examines additional features related to the implementation of the project at a level of detail that allows researchers to understand and replicate its analyses. The reader will find a wealth of information on the test and sample design,…

As a starting point for their analysis of equity, the authors begin their work here with an examination of the relationship between student performance, as measured by the California Academic Performance Index (API), and student needs, as measured by the percentage of students from low-income families (i.e., the percent of students eligible for…

Using fiscal data provided by the finance office of the school district, and personnel data obtained from the California Basic Education Data System (maintained by the California Department of Education, or CDE), the authors present analyses to provide a foundation for local policymakers that may be used to assess whether there are inequities in…

According to a new study of Milwaukee public schools, student achievement has benefited from voucher-based school competition. A novel method, using geocoding, was proposed for measuring the degree of competition within the city of Milwaukee and, in turn, for determining whether such competition has increased or decreased the achievement of public…

This review examines the recently released Thomas P. Fordham Institute report, "Education Olympics: The Games in Review." Published just after the completion of the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics, Education Olympics strategically parallels the international competition by awarding gold, silver and bronze medals to top performing countries based on…

Using fiscal data provided by the finance office of the school district, and personnel data obtained from the California Basic Education Data System maintained by the California Department of Education (CDE), the authors present analyses to provide a foundation for local policymakers that may be used to assess whether there are inequities in the…

The Cato Institute report examines international evidence on outcomes from public and private education. The paper makes three key claims: private schools outperform public schools in "the overwhelming majority of cases"; private schools' superiority is greatest in countries where the education system has more market features; and…

"How New York City's Charter Schools Affect Achievement" estimates the effects on student achievement of attending a New York City charter school rather than a traditional public school and investigates the characteristics of charter schools associated with the most positive effects on achievement. Because the report relies on an…

Beginning with the 2000 and 2001 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) assessments, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) has made technical documentation available on the worldwide web at http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/tdw/. The web-based documentation is designed to be less dense and more accessible than prior…

During the 2009-2010 school year, Marzano Research Laboratory (MRL) was commissioned by Promethean Ltd. to conduct a second year evaluation study of the effects of Promethean ActivClassroom on student academic achievement. This report describes the findings from the second year study along with aggregate findings from the first and second year…

Five sister reports published by the Friedman Foundation over the past two years have ignored the relevant research literature in asserting that private-school voucher programs can reduce the social costs of dropping out while increasing graduation rates. The reports are state-specific, targeting five different states. But each report follows a…

For more than 50 years, the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) has been conducting comparative studies of educational achievement in a number of curriculum areas, including mathematics and science. TIMSS 2011 represents the fifth cycle of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS),…