States can and should continue to measure student growth in 2021. Growth data will be crucial to understanding how school closures due to COVID-19 have affected student progress and what supports they will need to get back on track. Education leaders will also need growth data to ensure that any recovery efforts are equitable as well as effective…

In this paper we compare two approaches to measuring the average rate at which students learn in a given school or district. One type of measure--longitudinal growth measures--relies on student-level longitudinal data. A second type--cohort growth measures--relies only on repeated aggregated, cross-sectional data. Because student-level data is…

Increasing numbers of states have incorporated measures of students' academic growth into their data and accountability policies. Measuring growth is a statistically complicated task and complex growth measures can be easy to misinterpret. This paper reports on a survey of 317 Massachusetts principals' understanding of the Student Growth…

In 2010, the Massachusetts Legislature lifted the cap on the number of charter schools that the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) can authorize in low-performing school districts. The "smart cap" requires the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) to rank district performance (based on student outcomes)…

There is a paucity of evidence supporting the use of curriculum-based mathematics measures (M-CBMs) at the middle school level, which makes data-based decisions challenging for school professionals. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships among three existing M-CBM indices: (a) basic facts, (b) concepts/application, and (c)…