To address gaps in achievement between more- and less-affluent students, states and districts need to ensure that high-poverty students and schools have equitable access to educational resources. Traditionally, assessments of resource equity have focused on per-pupil expenditures and more proximal inputs, such as teacher credentials and class…

Recent educational accountability efforts have married student assessments with reform mandates and sanctions. As a result, students--beginning in early elementary grades--are feeling the pressures of this new era of high-stakes accountability. This article chronicles a story of the consequences of high-stakes testing on a father and his son.…

We argue that once we take into account the students' rational enrollment decisions, mismatch in the sense that the intended beneficiary of affirmative action admission policies are made worse off could occur only if selective universities possess private information about students' post-enrollment treatment effects. This necessary condition for…

Restates his earlier criticisms of the North Carolina Teacher Performance Appraisal Instrument. The instrument is not content specific and is built on an epistemology valuing propositional thinking and devaluating suppositional thinking at a time when other initiatives are promoting teachers' feelings of worth and sense of autonomy. (MLH)

A central concern of Joseph Milner's February 1991 "Kappan" article critiquing the North Carolina Teacher Performance Assessment Instrument is that teacher evaluation will drive teaching. He errs in confusing essential skills with basic skills, ignoring all teacher evaluation's purposes except instructional improvement, and claiming the…

Draws on findings from evaluations of recent reform initiatives in Alabama, North Carolina, and Ohio to suggest that performance-measurement systems for state child-welfare programs must adapt to changing circumstances, especially when improvements in one area can influence standards and expectations in others. (Author/KB)