Each fall the author assigns undergraduate teacher education students to design rubrics that they can use to evaluate auditions for reality television shows like "American Idol." The point is to draw students into a critical reflection on assessment literature and practices they have been studying. Through these reflections, the author…

Given the primary role of teachers in affecting student achievement, U.S. policy makers and reformers have increasingly focused on monitoring and evaluating teacher effectiveness by emphasizing the links to student learning outcomes. Large-scale international assessments are frequently used as base examples to justify reform. But, relatively…

Most children who do not learn to read during the primary grades will probably never learn to read well. Children who reach the end of third grade with low literacy skills typically have less access to the regular curriculum, require long-term support, and fall further behind their peers in literacy achievement and curricular knowledge. However,…

In their widely read article "Inside the Black Box," the authors demonstrated that improving formative assessment raises student achievement. Now in this article, they and their colleagues report on a follow-up project that has helped teachers change their practice and students change their behavior so that everyone shares responsibility…

School leaders who want success for all students know that it does not come easily. Getting to what activates student improvement often requires a major unearthing of beliefs about instruction and leadership practices. Such inquiry can help schools realize that their current ways of working are not meeting student learning needs and that practices…

Brownsville Independent School District in Texas garnered the Broad Prize for Urban Education in 2008 by narrowing the gap between its largely immigrant Hispanic enrollment and other low-income children in the state. Its efforts are notable for the district's ability to move English language learners to proficiency in a few years by its reliance…

Gerald Bracey has been dismayed at the uncritical acceptance of international comparisons in this country. It seems to him that otherwise competent researchers and psychometricians abandon all critical facilities when dealing with data from the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement--the TIMSS studies and PIRLS--or…

In this personal narrative, the author notes that he has often said more or less in jest that when it comes to evaluating international studies, people lose their critical capacities and forget everything they ever learned in their courses in research methods and statistics. Results that would raise flags in any other endeavor receive no…

Recalling a study about public attitudes toward schools in various countries, the author of this article asked Jouni Valijarvi of the University of Juvaskyla how Finns perceived their schools and whether PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) results had any impact on their perceptions. Valijarvi was the senior author of The Finnish…

In this article, the author profiles Charles Dickens Elementary School in Vancouver, British Columbia, a school that dares to be different from the rest. This elementary school operates on a child-centered, multi-aged framework that is based on belief in an orientation towards continuous progress, appropriate evaluation of progress, schoolwide…

There are only three South Korean universities that count in Koreans' eyes and they enroll 15,000 students, chosen from 873,000 applicants (1.7%), based on the results of a national exam. The night before the national exam, many mothers pray all night in temple. (They also prayed the previous 99 nights, but not so long.) The country comes to a…

A four-year experimental study in Ireland to study the effects of testing yielded similar results to studies by the "Pittsburgh group." They found that test results are not very important to either central office administrators or teachers in making decisions about students. (Author/WD)

Describes how two secondary schools implemented the six basic elements of personalized instruction: The Thomas Haney Secondary Centre in Maple Ridge, British Columbia, and the Francis W. Parker Charter Essential School in Devens, Massachusetts. (Contains 14 references.) (PKP)

Heather-Jane Robertson's "In Canada" column in the May 1999 "Kappan" demonstrated a wish to discredit an organization for ideological and personal reasons. Comments concerning the homogenization of curriculum and the impetus of the School Achievement Indicators Program (SAIP) to standardized curriculum are pure hyperbole.…

Governments have just a few policy levers they can pull to improve schooling. In this article, the authors show how British Columbia is making systematic use of one--information--to focus attention on improving student performance. Parents, students, educators, and elected officials all agree that the high-level performance of schools should be…