Preparing to become a music teacher educator is a complex process and one component of this process should be learning to model, demonstrate, and teach assessment practices to preservice music educators. The purpose of this exploratory qualitative study was to discover how, and to what extent, music teacher educators (MTEs) are educated about…

A growing number of states are interested in tracking the readiness of children entering kindergarten. In 2010, just seven states (Alaska, Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Maryland, Minnesota, and Vermont) collected Kindergarten Entry Assessment (KEA) data for the purposes of aggregating data at the state level. Since this time, most states report…

University tuition fees and student debt have risen in part due to rapid expansion of university administration compensation. This study provides a novel methodology for detecting inappropriate executive compensation within universities. The usefulness of academic ideas is openly ranked using the h-index. By comparing the ratio of academic…

This report describes common and unique approaches that Regional Educational Laboratory (REL) Midwest Region states have adopted in developing and implementing their quality rating and improvement systems (QRISs). A QRIS is a method for assessing, improving, and communicating the quality of early childhood education and care providers. The study…

The push for accountability in public schooling has extended to the measurement of teacher performance, accelerated by federal efforts through Race to the Top. Currently, a large number of states and districts across the country are computing measures of teacher performance based on the standardized test scores of their students and using them in…

Each year, the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) publishes the "State Teacher Policy Yearbook," a comprehensive examination of the state laws, rules and regulations that govern the teaching profession, measured against a realistic set of reform goals. For five years running, the full "Yearbook" compendium…

Career and technical education (CTE) is increasingly seen as a major potential contributor to the recovery of the U.S. economy. However, the effectiveness and impact of the current Carl D. Perkins Act (otherwise known as Perkins IV) that governs CTE are unclear. Is the federal investment in CTE paying off? To answer this, we need to establish the…

The Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) is working to respond to increased interest in the use of growth models for school accountability. Growth models are based on tracking change in individual student achievement scores over multiple years. While growth models have been used for decades in academic research and program evaluation, a…

In October 2010, WestEd's Strategic Literacy Initiative (SLI) won an i3 "Validation" grant to scale up and validate the Reading Apprenticeship (RA) model in three core secondary content area classes: U.S. history, biology, and English language arts. SLI's proposal stated two goals. Goal 1: To transform academic literacy teaching and…

The Newspaper Division of the proceedings contains the following 22 papers: "Framing Freedom: Hoosier Republican and Democratic Newspaper Editors Frame Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation" (David W. Bulla); "Quantifying Newspaper Quality: 'I Know It When I See It'" (Philip Meyer and Koang-Hyub Kim); "Cultural Convergence:…

This study finds that nearly every school in the Great Lakes states is threatened to fail the Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) requirements mandated by the federal "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB) Act. NCLB holds schools and districts accountable for student achievement on state standardized tests and schools that do not make AYP face…

This appendix describes the analytical procedures used to project the status of schools in the Great Lakes state toward meeting AYP (Adequate Yearly Progress) requirements from 2005 to 2014. To "make AYP," the school as a whole and each numerically significant subgroup must meet "Annual Measurable Objectives" (annual…