States in the Regional Educational Laboratory (REL) Central region serve a largely rural population with many states enrolling fewer than 350,000 students. A common challenge identified among REL Central educators is identifying appropriate methods for analyzing data with small samples of students. In particular, members of the REL Central…

This article examines K-12 online student and school performance across an entire state (Colorado) in the United States through two comparisons. First, state assessment scores of students in online schools are compared to those in traditional brick and mortar schools. Second, the accountability scores of online schools are compared to those of…

Public schools in some areas of the U.S. are as segregated as they were prior to court-ordered busing, in part due to school choice policies that appear to exacerbate extant segregation. In particular, Latina/o students are increasingly isolated in schools characterized as being in cycles of decline. Our case study of one such school is based on a…

Under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, schools were held almost exclusively accountable for absolute levels of student performance. But that meant that even schools that were making great strides with students were still labeled as "failing," just because the students had not yet made it all the way to a "proficient" level…

Productive strategies for evaluating outcomes in teacher licensure programs are becoming increasingly important in the education field. Research data from 492 teacher licensure program completers from 2006-2009 in the School of Education, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado (USA) was compiled after accreditation by the Colorado…

In grade 8 (the only grade in which subgroup trends were analyzed by achievement level), Colorado students showed gains in reading at the proficient level for racial/ethnic subgroups, low income students, and boys and girls. There were slight declines or flat trends for almost all subgroups at the advanced level in reading. In math, gains were…

A number of states have school building accountability systems that rely on comparisons of achievement from one year to the next. Improvement of the performance of schools is judged by changes in the achievement of successive groups of students. Year-to-year changes in scores for successive groups of students have a great deal of volatility. The…

Studied the stability of accountability scores and gains for schools using fourth-grade reading results for schools (samples from 757 to 802 schools) in Colorado for 4 years of administration of the Colorado Student Assessment Program. Year-to-year changes were found to be quite unstable, resulting in a near zero correlation of the school gains…

Many states have implemented high-stakes testing since the enactment of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. Yet the question remains whether high-stakes tests effectively measure student proficiency. This report describes a study that compared results on high-stakes tests with results on other standardized tests not used for accountability…

This article discusses the Mapping CSAP (Colorado Student Achievement Program) project, an extension of a grant-funded programme that sought to show the importance of a geographic perspective on public policy decision-making at the state level. In this programme, high school students were asked to grapple with current state issues in Colorado,…

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…