Background/significance: Standards-based accountability systems have been a pillar of education reform in the United States for almost three decades. Although accountability systems have evolved in progressive reauthorizations of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), the underlying theory of action has changed little. The basic…

Schools' priorities in student selection constitute the basis for fairness in school admissions. We study the case where schools are active strategic players that rank their applicants in terms of priorities. A methodological framework is developed to examine the impact of the variation in the admission settings on the equality of opportunity in…

Teacher quality and student achievement have shown positive relationships in prior studies of elementary and secondary grade levels in the United States. However, postsecondary career and technical education (CTE) teacher quality and student achievement is an understudied topic. According to the literature, teacher quality is measured by…

Decades of federal and state education legislation enacted to increase student academic achievement and enhance school quality have pronounced impacts on teachers and their instructional practice. That impact is captured in the term intensification. Intensification is multifaceted and manifests as additional tasks accomplished simultaneously, with…

Founded in Minneapolis by Angela Jerabek, a former school counselor, Building Assets, Reducing Risks (BARR) is an education model built on research about the importance of prioritizing relationships with the power of data. The implementation of BARR at South Fort Myers High School saw dramatic and measurable changes as well as exponential academic…

A decade ago, states across the nation adopted the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in an effort to raise the academic bar for their students. This has provoked countless political battles since then--including an especially intense one in Florida. That fight culminated in Governor Ron DeSantis vowing to eliminate and replace the Common Core,…

In this article, Joellen Killion highlights the methodology, analysis, findings, and limitations of Ronfeldt, M., Farmer, S., McQueen, K., & Grissom, J. (2015), "Teacher collaboration in instructional teams and student achievement," "American Educational Research Journal," 52(3), 475-514. Using sophisticated statistical…

This i3 scale-up study examined the implementation and effectiveness of a 3-year literacy intervention developed by the Children's Literacy Initiative (CLI). The study was a school-level cluster randomized controlled trial conducted in 55 elementary schools from four states. Implementation results showed a high level of fidelity of intervention…

Due to the growing importance of the professional role of teachers, effective evaluation practices are essential to ensuring highly qualified educators. The problem addressed was how Volusia County School teachers in the state of Florida experienced the teacher evaluation process and how that impacted the effectiveness of instructional practices…

This case study sought to gain a better understanding of the impact of the Cambridge Acceleration Program on students' transition from high school to college at one American university. The findings from an online questionnaire indicate that many participants develop a range of skills that are perceived as important in the context of university…

As state tests of student achievement are used for an increasingly wide array of high- and low-stakes purposes, evaluating their instructional sensitivity is essential. This article uses data from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's Measures of Effective Project to examine the instructional sensitivity of 4 states' mathematics and English…

Michigan has a problem. By several measures, the achievement of students attending its K-12 educational system has not kept pace with other states. Although Michigan's student achievement has improved over the past decade, the improvement has been modest, and achievement in many other states has easily surpassed that in Michigan. Furthermore,…

Despite policy efforts to encourage multiple measures of performance in newly developing teacher evaluation systems, practical constraints often result in evaluations based predominantly on formal classroom observations. Yet there is limited knowledge of how these observational measures relate to student achievement. This article leverages the…

Annually American College Testing (ACT) provides a snapshot of the college and career readiness of ACT-tested high school graduates. This report is designed to help educators understand and answer the following questions: (1) Are students prepared for college and career, and are younger students on target? (2) Are enough students taking core…

This study draws upon survey and administrative data on over 9,000 teachers in 336 Miami-Dade County public schools over 2 years to investigate the kinds of collaborations that exist in instructional teams across the district and whether these collaborations predict student achievement. While different kinds of teachers and schools report…