Speaking in front of the Education Writers Association, Secretary Betsy DeVos said that decades of reform efforts and increased social spending, both inside and outside of schools, "hasn't ultimately improved anything for any students, particularly not for the most vulnerable students." This seems to be a standard refrain from DeVos, and…

In concert with other Latin American countries, Brazil has developed and implemented its own national assessment system for the purpose of monitoring, evaluating and improving their educational system. Prova Brasil is a census-based bi-annual assessment of Portuguese and mathematics achievement of middle school students in Brazil accompanied by…

Though measures of long-term academic performance trends are valuable to education policy analysts and policymakers, they have been hard to come by at the state level, where most education policy is made. Such data are either nonexistent prior to 1990 or are unrepresentative of statewide student populations. A continuous series of state mean SAT…

The goal of the present article is to synthesize findings to date from the Delaware Longitudinal Study of Fraction Learning. The study followed a large cohort of children (N = 536) between Grades 3 and 6. The findings showed that many students, especially those with diagnosed learning disabilities, made minimal growth in fraction knowledge and…

The National Indian Education Study (NIES) is administered as part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) to allow more in-depth reporting on the achievement and experiences of American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN)1 students in grades 4 and 8. This report focuses primarily on two themes identified during the development of the…

This paper describes the extent to which the science content in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) is similar to that in the science assessment frameworks for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) at the middle school level. Using NAEP as a common…

Over the years, the nation's large urban school districts have consistently learned from the progress of their peer districts across the country. In 2002, the board of directors of the Council of the Great City Schools (Council) authorized what became known as the Performance Measurement and Benchmarking Project to develop and implement key…

A comparison of Chicago public school students' standardized test scores in 2009-2014 with those of public students across the U.S. reveals two striking patterns. First, Chicago students' scores improved dramatically more, on average, between third and eighth grade than those of the average student in the U.S. This is true for students of all…

The relationships between cumulative family risk factors and American students' academic performance were examined in all 50 States and the District of Columbia. Data from the 2007 "American Community Survey" were used to ascertain the percent of birth to 18 year old children in the United States who experienced three or more risk…

The purpose of this article is to assess areas of opportunity and access for students of color to participate in the science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine pipeline (STEMM). Using a Critical Race Theory framework, this position paper reviews occupational outcomes and stratification in STEMM fields, examines the pertinence of…

Over the years, the nation's large urban school districts have consistently learned from the progress of their peer districts across the country. In 2002, the board of directors of the Council of the Great City Schools (Council) authorized what became known as the Performance Measurement and Benchmarking Project to develop and implement key…

This article proposes the use of a standards-based approach to reporting results from large-scale assessment surveys in South Africa. The use of this approach is intended to address the key shortcomings observed in the current reporting framework prescribed in the national curriculum documents. Using the Angoff method and data from the Annual…

The Common Core State Standards, released in 2010, were rapidly adopted by more than 40 states. Champions maintained that these rigorous standards would transform American education, but the initiative went on to encounter a bumpy path. A decade on, what are we to make of this ambitious effort? What kind of impact, if any, has it had on the…

Over the last twenty-five years, the Minnesota Historical Society, the University of Minnesota Libraries, and Minitex have developed a partnership centered on creating pathways to higher education by engaging local middle school and high school students in immersive programs at academic libraries. These activities vary in scope and content, but…

A broader understanding of the importance of student behaviors and school climate as drivers of academic performance and the wider acceptance that schools have a role in nurturing the "whole child" have increased attention to indicators that go beyond traditional metrics focused on proficiency in math and reading. The 2015 passage of the…