Validly assessing students with disabilities has been a challenge for decades but is increasingly vital to educational policy and practice in the current era of accountability. Numerous technological and policy developments have occurred in the past several years with the emergence and decline of various forms of alternate assessments. This study…

This article proposes closing the academic performance gaps between African American and Latino students and their White counterparts particularly in the line of research that concerns the idea of "stereotype threat." Stereotype threat is predicated on the notion that people often fear behaving in a way that fits the negative cultural…

This summary from the "Public Schooling in Southeast Wisconsin: 2013-2014" full report presents the school district performance in a pull-out format. Definitions are provided for the column heading: (1) Total Operations Spending, (2) Property Tax Revenue, (3) Total Enrollment; (4) One-Year Change in Enrollment, (5) Minority Enrollment,…

This article considers the impact of a high-stakes testing and reporting requirement on students using publicly funded vouchers to attend private schools. We describe how such a policy was implemented during the course of a previously authorized multi-year evaluation of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, which provided us with data on voucher…

Randomized experiments are often considered the strongest designs to study the impact of educational interventions. Perhaps the most prevalent class of designs used in large scale education experiments is the cluster randomized design in which entire schools are assigned to treatments. In cluster randomized trials (CRTs) that assign schools to…

Social psychological interventions in schools have gained popularity in education research for their ability to often dramatically increase student academic performance through simple exercises. Many of these interventions are designed to address stereotype threat, which is defined as "being at risk of confirming, as self-characteristic, a…

Being an educational leader isn't getting any easier, but it has never been more exciting, especially when one has the opportunity to change the face of education and move it into the 21st century. For some people, this change is fun and invigorating, but for others, it can be downright frightening and painful. So how can teachers and school…

The School Choice Demonstration Project has published a series of reports written in the fifth and final year of its evaluation of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP). This review is of Report #32, which compares the test performance of MPCP students to that of a sample of students from the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS). The comparisons…

In the United States, approximately 65 percent of all jobs in 2020 will require some level of postsecondary education, and the demand will reach 68 percent in Iowa. This report seeks to inform public discourse on higher education by providing key performance indicators relevant to the goal of improving educational attainment for a healthy economy…

In the United States, approximately 65 percent of all jobs in 2020 will require some level of postsecondary education, and the demand will reach 62 percent in Wisconsin. This report seeks to inform public discourse on higher education by providing key performance indicators relevant to the goal of improving educational attainment for a healthy…

Making robust and reliable information about schools accessible is one of the most powerful ways to foster engagement and promote informed decisions that will shape our communities. Though education data is frequently collected and aggregated at the state level, data is rarely synthesized across cities. This report provides comparable information…

This study examined the effects of testing accommodations on eighth-grade students' performance on large-scale achievement tests and also on their attitudes and reactions to the tests. Findings revealed significant differences in the ways students with and without disabilities experienced testing and how testing accommodations affected students'…

The School Choice Demonstration Project has published a series of reports written in the fifth and final year of its evaluation of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP). This review is of Report #30, a final follow up to a five-year study examining high school graduation and post-secondary enrollment rates for students participating in the…

In this article, the author describes a bike trip which marks the culmination of a unit reviewing map-reading capabilities. In seventh grade, students develop various map skills, including cardinal and intermediate directions, how to measure distance on a map using a scale of miles, how to interpret the legend of a map, and how to locate places…

Background: Cluster-randomized experiments that assign intact groups such as schools or school districts to treatment conditions are increasingly common in educational research. Such experiments are inherently multilevel designs whose sensitivity (statistical power and precision of estimates) depends on the variance decomposition across levels.…