There are close to 200,000 students in Houston Independent School District (ISD), and many of them are recent immigrants who have been in the United States for three years or less. In recent years, the number of immigrant students in the district has increased dramatically, with over 11,000 enrolled in each of the past eight years. In fact, nearly…

Arguably, constructive alignment has been the major challenge for assessment in the context of problem-based learning (PBL). PBL focuses on promoting abilities such as clinical reasoning, team skills and metacognition. PBL also aims to foster self-directed learning and deep learning as opposed to rote learning. This has incentivized researchers in…

We develop a new framework for identifying at-risk students in public schools. Our framework has two fundamental advantages over "status quo" systems: (1) it is based on a clear definition of what it means for a student to be at risk and (2) it leverages states' rich administrative data systems to produce more informative risk measures.…

Every summer, the news is filled with stories about summer learning loss. The warnings sound dire: two months of math learning lost for most students every summer, and two to three months of reading learning lost for low-income students, according to the National Summer Learning Association. By the ninth grade, "summer learning loss during…

The National Network of State Teachers of the Year (NNSTOY) conducted a months-long study on how to diversify the teacher workforce. The study analyzed the practices of current and former educators and school personnel who have overseen hiring educators. A complementary literature review examined the effectiveness of current efforts in place…

The authors of this article call upon classroom memories to demonstrate the harm of the standardized testing apparatus in the English Language Arts (ELA) classroom. Goal setting under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) has led to targeted school intervention based on metrics, and many states have chosen to double down on standardized ELA and…

In recent years, the federal government (under Republican and Democratic administrations alike) has encouraged the outsourcing of core parts of public education's work, including testing and test preparation, teaching and tutoring, data collection, and human resources management. However, researchers have found little evidence to support policy…

Giftedness in science today is largely measured by various kinds of standardized tests--IQ tests, SATs, ACTs, GREs, and so forth. For example, many STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) gifted programs rely at least in part on IQ tests or the SAT for identifying students as gifted. It might be useful to supplement such standard measures…

There seems to always be a new twist on high school testing in the U.S.; testing that is, at least in part, mandated by federal education law. As someone who grew up taking the New York State Regents exams, the author has thinking about high school testing for a long time. In this report, the author offers some thoughts about the current state of…

Data can be a powerful tool for self-evaluation, goal setting, and advocacy in the school library. Regardless of the grade level or the size of the student body, any school library has meaningful data to mine and learn from. Basic data such as circulation numbers can impact a myriad of areas relevant to student learning such as collection…

This paper follows on from the previous bulletin (Redford 2019), which covered the education remit of the Parliament's Education and Skills Committee between September 2018 and January 2019. The following bulletin covers the remit of the Education and Skills Committee from February 2019 to June 2019. [For the previous bulletin (v51 n1 2019), see…

After a decade as an education professor, Greg Michie decided to return to his teaching roots. He went back to the same Chicago neighborhood, the same public school, and the same grade level and subject he taught in the 1990s. But much had changed--both in schools and in the world outside them. "Same As It Never Was" chronicles Michie's…

The purpose of this Brief is to highlight available federal data about the characteristics of English learners with disabilities, including how the population has changed over time. Understanding the characteristics of English learners with disabilities is critical to ensuring that their needs are met appropriately during the assessment process.…

Storytelling is a craft that takes "talking" to the level of "telling." The cleverest of teachers know these tricks. In this article the author presents the art of storytelling and why it is so important, especially in the educational environment of national standards and standardized testing.

Standardised testing regimes, including the National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) in Australia, have impacted on relationships between and within schools, and on teachers' work and on pedagogies. Previous analyses of the effects of NAPLAN have been generated outside of the test situation: frequently through attitudinal surveys…