Schools must help all students achieve. Leaders who understand the elements of culture and their impact on an organization can be very effective. In 2015, as part of a strategy to cultivate healthy school cultures, the State of Michigan deployed a new self-reporting school culture inventory as part of each school's annual reporting. In this…

This is the Mackinac Center's fourth school report card and covers elementary and middle schools. A similar report card was published in 2013, and this edition includes two years' worth of new data. A unique characteristic of this report card is that takes into consideration the "context" of a school when assessing its performance.…

The Michigan Context and Performance Report Card measures school performance by adjusting standardized test scores to account for student background. Comparing schools using unadjusted test scores ignores the significant relationship between academic performance and student socioeconomic background--a dynamic outside a school's control. The…

The 2014 Michigan Public High School Context and Performance Report Card is the Mackinac Center's second effort to measure high school performance. The first high school assessment was published in 2012, followed by the Center's 2013 elementary and middle school report card, which used a similar methodology to evaluate school performance. The…

Assessing a high school's effectiveness is not straightforward. Comparing a school's standardized test scores to those of other schools is one approach to measuring effectiveness, but a major objection to this method is that students' test scores tend to be related to students' "socioeconomic" status--family household income, for…

This study is an examination of Florida and Michigan's performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress's (NAEP) standardized test, often referred to as "the nation's report card." Immediately prior to and during Florida's immense improvement on these scores from the past 15 years, the state made substantial changes to its…

In this article, the author reports on what he found impressive in the evaluation results of the program Reading First (RF) in four states: Utah, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Florida. The author states that responding to these four exemplary state-level studies of Reading First evoked mixed feelings. He noticed three things: (1) the RF effect…

In 1990, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) included a Trial State Assessment (TSA); for the first time in NAEP's history, voluntary state-by-state assessments were made. In 1992, the NAEP Program included an expanded TSA in fourth-grade reading. The 1992 reading assessment considered students' performance in situations that…

The 1998 NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) state level reading assessment measured fourth- and eighth-grade students' reading proficiency in situations that involved reading for three purposes: reading for literary experience, reading to gain information, and reading to perform a task (grade 8 only). This report describes the…

This report provides selected results from the 2002 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) for Michigan's public-school students at grades 4 and 8. Since 1992, reading has been assessed in four different years at the state level (at grade 4 in 1992 and 1994, and at both grades 4 and 8 in 1998 and 2002). Michigan participated in all of…

An external evaluation reporting on the Title III, Elementary and Secondary Act, Open Concept School Program for Indian Education, focuses on cognitive and psychomotor development of experimental students, perceptions of the program (staff members, parents, and non-experimental teachers), and program accomplishment of other objectives, primarily…