This paper reports on research conducted as part of the International Instructional System Study that explored five subject areas across nine jurisdictions in six high-performing countries. The Study's overall aim was to understand what, if anything, there is in common in the curricula and assessment arrangements among the high-performing…

Individual teachers, administrators, and parents made tremendous efforts to continue educating the Commonwealth's children between March and June of this year. But no amount of dedicated individual effort could have overcome fundamental challenges: weak guidance to districts from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) against…

It is common practice for K-12 schools to assess multilingual students' language proficiency to determine language support program placement. Because such programs can provide essential scaffolding, the policies guiding these assessments merit careful consideration. It is well accepted that quality assessments must be valid (representative of the…

A common claim about mathematics education is that it should equip students to use mathematics in the "real world". In this paper, we examine how relationships between mathematics education and the real world are materialised in the curriculum across a sample of eleven jurisdictions. In particular, we address the orientation of the…