After the authors reviewed the "State of State Standards--and the Common Core--in 2010" they found that the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) were clearer and more rigorous than the English language arts (ELA) standards in 37 states and stronger than the math standards in 39 states. States were encouraged to adopt the CCSS. By 2013 the…

The "Knowledge Is Power Program" ("KIPP") is a nonprofit network of more than 200 public charter schools educating early childhood, elementary, middle, and high school students. The What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) identified four studies of "KIPP" that fall within the scope of the Charter Schools topic area and meet…

This research examines the specialized knowledge of reading comprehension articulated by 12 middle school English language arts teachers sampled from three different regions of the United States and representing various levels of teaching experience. Using detailed interviews, concept mapping, and think aloud methods, we identified salient…

For several years, WestEd's Measure to Learn and Improve (MLI) project team has kept California state policy leaders informed about the statewide implementation of the California Academic Standards in English language arts and mathematics, by summarizing and disseminating results from the RAND Corporation's annual American Educator Panel (AEP)…

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…

This research embedded in the National Study of Writing Instruction examines higher- and lower-achieving adolescents' stances toward content-area writing through a qualitative discourse analysis of interviews with 40 students in California, Kentucky, New York, and Texas secondary schools. The study asked: (1) How do students' stances toward…

What is "teaching to the test," and can one detect evidence of this practice in state test scores? This paper unpacks this concept and empirically investigates one variant of it by analyzing test item--level data from three states' mathematics and reading tests. We show that NCLB-era state tests predictably emphasized some state…

Recent years have seen the convergence of two major policy streams in U.S. K-12 education: standards/accountability and teacher quality reforms. Work in these areas has led to the creation of multiple measures of teacher quality, including measures of their instructional alignment to standards/assessments, observational and student survey measures…

In this study, we examined how the relationships between one observation protocol, the Protocol for Language Arts Teaching Observation (PLATO), and value-added measures shift when different tests are used to assess student achievement. Using data from the Measures of Effective Teaching Project, we found that PLATO was more strongly related to the…

In fall 2009, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project to test new approaches to measuring effective teaching. The goal of the MET project is to improve the quality of information about teaching effectiveness available to education professionals within states and districts--information that…

A study has been examining current directions in state education agency efforts to reform the elementary school language arts curriculum in four large, geographically diverse states with different policy mechanisms--California, New York, Wisconsin, and Texas. To understand policy development and implementation and discern how advocates advance a…

Media literacy education is being explored by scholars in many different fields (including education, literature, media studies, psychology, and public health), but there is less evidence of implementations occurring in K-12 settings. With more than 1.3 million teachers in U.S. public schools, it is impossible to estimate the extent to which the…