A new report concludes that, judging by most indicators of well-being, life has improved over the past 10 years for the nation's children--except when it comes to their education and health. According to the Foundation for Child Development's "2006 Child Well-Being Index" released last week, children's educational achievement levels largely…

A generation of reform measures in the Southeastern states appears to be paying off in higher student achievement, as measured by "the nation's report card." Nine- and 13-year-olds from that region, in fact, posted the highest gains in both reading and mathematics on the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)…

President Bush says that the No Child Left Behind Act is working, pointing to student-achievement results from a single subsection of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and tentative Reading First data. But the evidence available to support his claim is questionable. The data Mr. Bush cited are from just the "long-term…

The two city districts that made the greatest strides in math on the latest national assessment relied on similar strategies: building students' conceptual math skills and investing in professional development in that subject for elementary and middle school teachers. While administrators in Boston and San Diego say that many factors were at work…

From President Bush on down, the pressure is on to fix America's high schools. Despite a broad consensus that something is seriously wrong with the institution, deep fault lines remain about the remedies. Part of the reluctance to address high schools has been their complexity. The sheer size, departmental structure, mission creep, and other…

This paper reports the results of a special urban study of the 2005 National Assessment of Education Progress which indicates that city school districts may be seeing some payoff from years of work to improve mathematics instruction. However, similar initiatives to raise reading achievement have not led to significant gains. While, most of the 11…

Many people predicted that 2005 would be the year that schools nationwide began feeling the bite of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, as states ratcheted up their performance targets and more schools failed to meet those benchmarks. But such dire predictions are not playing out uniformly across the states. Of the 33 states and the District of…

Students in New Hampshire will not be alone when they will take their new state mathematics and reading tests. Their fellow students in Rhode Island and Vermont will be taking the same exams along with them. This article reports that New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont have joined forces to create reading and math tests in grades 3-8. They…

A national commission formed to review the future of the 12th grade National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has recommended that the nation's primary barometer of student performance should expand dramatically to provide mandatory state results on the achievement of 12th graders and to measure their readiness for college, employment,…

On the 2000 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) math, 17 percent of high school seniors scored at the "proficient" level --just under half the percentage scoring at that level on the NAEP reading test. Twenty-two percent of college freshmen are identified as needing remedial math, according to the National Center for…