Students classified as English learners (EL) are a protected class of students with core legal rights. There are clear opportunities to strengthen education policies and practices to improve opportunities and outcomes for EL-classified students. This dissertation is comprised of three studies examining key issues in EL education with the goal of…

Over the past 30 years, numerous policies have focused on closing the achievement gap in the United States. Despite this emphasis on mastery and proficiency, students continue to perform below expectations. We use standardized math test performance to explore whether schools have been able to eliminate the achievement gap across middle-level…

Charter schools are the most popular alternative to traditional public schooling in the United States. The majority of research indicates positive effects of charter schools on student performance in traditional public schools. Most studies use the share of charter school students enrolled as a measure of the competitive pressure of charter…

By coincidence or not, Massachusetts, Illinois and Virginia created civic education task forces not long after national test results showed a dismal understanding of the subject matter across all grade levels. Results of the 2010 National Assessment of Educational Progress showed just 25 percent of all testtakers in grades 4, 8 and 12 demonstrated…

The stakes of large-scale testing programs have grown considerably in the past decade with the enactment of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Race To The Top (RTTT) legislations. A significant component of NCLB has been required reporting of annual yearly progress (AYP) of student subgroups disaggregated by sex, special education status, English…

The Oregon Statewide Report Card is an annual publication required by law (ORS 329.115), which reports on the state of public schools and their progress towards the goals of the Oregon Educational Act for the 21st Century. The purpose of the Oregon Report Card is to monitor trends among school districts and Oregon's progress toward achieving the…

The Oregon Statewide Report Card is an annual publication required by law (ORS 329.115), which reports on the state of public schools and their progress towards the goals of the Oregon Educational Act for the 21st Century. The purpose of the Oregon Report Card is to monitor trends among school districts and Oregon's progress toward achieving the…

This general achievement trends profile includes information that the Center on Education Policy (CEP) and the Human Resources Research Organization (HumRRO) obtained from states from fall 2008 through April 2009. Included herein are: (1) Bullet points summarizing key findings about achievement trends in that state at three performance…

This paper profiles the student subgroup achievement and gap trends in Oregon for 2010. In grade 8 (the only grade in which subgroup trends were analyzed by achievement level), Oregon showed a clear trend of gains in reading and math at the basic-and-above, proficient-and-above, and advanced levels for all major racial/ethnic subgroups, low-income…

Six years after passage of No Child Left Behind and midway to the nation's goal of having students on grade level or better in reading and math by 2014, more data than ever before has been collected about the academic performance of American students and schools. Information in this brochure charts student demographics, achievement-to-date and…

This year the Center on Education Policy (CEP) 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…