Several school performance indices were evaluated using achievement data from multiple longitudinally matched middle school student cohorts in a large district in the southwestern United States. Measures designed to index the within-cohort achievement status and growth of students as well as the status and growth-based changes that occur over…

The Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) test was the major source of data for the Texas educational accountability system from 1994 through 2002. Contrary to critics who claim that TAAS data are invalid and unreliable measures of student performance, structural equation analyses of TAAS reading data based on the 1994 Texas third grade…

The No Child Left Behind Act is a mandate from the federal government for education to increase student performance and school accountability. As a result of this mandate, many states have issued the use of high-stakes standardized tests as a means of monitoring schools' accountability. New York State administers the English Language Arts (ELA)…

Educational accountability has grown substantially over the last decade, due in large part to the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. Accordingly, educational researchers and policymakers are interested in the statistical properties of accountability models used for NCLB, such as status, improvement, and growth models; as well as others that are not…

This study investigated the convergent and discriminant validity of the high-stakes Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) in both reading and writing at grade levels 4, 8, and 10. The data from the 2006 FCAT administration were analyzed via traditional multitrait-multimethod (MTMM) analysis to identify the factor structure and structural…