The current study will examine possible contextual effects relative to differences in reading comprehension performance in the state of Florida. While the Reading First (RF) Impact study examined such difference using a regression discontinuity design, the authors are primarily interested in other analytic methods that might answer different…

The 2006-2007 school year was the eighth annual reporting period since disaggregating the performance of students with disabilities on state and district-wide assessments was required by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). It is the fifth reporting period since the enactment of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), and the…

Why and under which conditions do international student assessment programmes like PISA have success? How can the results of these assessments be useful for advocates of different, even contradictory, policies? What might explain different patterns of using assessment as a tool for school governance? Drawing on historical and comparative research,…

Math experts developed Formative Assessment Lessons that teachers can incorporate throughout the year's curriculum. Both tools target the "instructional core." A study by Research for Action (RFA) examining the first year of piloting the Literacy Design Collaborative (LDC) and Math Design Collaborative (MDC) tools (2010-11) found…

This final report presents findings from a multi-year evaluation of the Comprehensive Technical Assistance Centers, a federally funded program that provides technical assistance to states in connection with the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, as reauthorized by the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001. With the redesign of the Center…

As the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law moves through the reauthorization process, it is important to understand the basic performance impacts of its central structure of accountability. In this paper, I examine the effects of failure to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) under NCLB on subsequent student math and reading performance at the school…

Current and former leaders of many major urban school districts, including Washington, D.C.'s Michelle Rhee and New Orleans' Paul Vallas, have sought to use tests to evaluate teachers. In fact, the use of high-stakes standardized tests to evaluate teacher performance in the manner of value-added measurement (VAM) has become one of the cornerstones…

The purpose of this study was to determine the extent secondary assistant principals in large Texas high schools demonstrate behaviors consistent with what the literature describes as instructional leadership. Three hundred seventy principals and assistant principals of large Texas high schools participated in this study. The Principal…

Over the past year, the nation's governors and state school chiefs have achieved laudable consensus around a set of math and English standards, developed voluntarily and without federal involvement through the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI). Most states have signed on to them. More recently, the states have again teamed up--this…

The eight-year-old No Child Left Behind Act established for the first time a federal benchmark for student achievement. When the Obama Administration took office, the new president promised to stay true to the goal of NCLB while upgrading what critics have termed simplistic, "fill in a bubble" testing to create a more comprehensive…

The former president of Teachers College, Columbia University, Arthur Levine questioned the connection between what one learns in pre-service teacher education programs and what one does as a teacher. From a meta-analysis of several studies he found that: A shockingly low percentage of principals said that their teachers were very or moderately…

Over the last decade, high-stakes test preparation has crept into the inventory of developmentally responsive middle level instructional practices. Amid calls for increased accountability and more rigorous curriculum and academic standards, the middle school movement now finds itself in a spotlight of intense scrutiny. This article examines the…

English-language learners (ELLs) with special needs consistently languish in the American school system. The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) included ELLs as a minority group and required to hold schools accountable for reducing the achievement gap between ELLs and their white peers, however the act did not provide a specific direction for…

Media scholars have long recognized the interaction between the medium that conveys the information and the information that is conveyed. This study examined the relative impact of different low- and high-tech instructional mediums (e.g., flashcards and the iTouch) on the acquisition of general education content-referenced sight words and…

This dissertation investigates the prevailing No Child Left Behind (NCLB) mandate as an effective platform to improve schools. The data compiled for use in this study represented 426 high schools in Pennsylvania and were retrieved from publicly accessible, state-sponsored sources. The statistical methodologies from the Pennsylvania Value-Added…