New Hampshire's Performance Assessment of Competency Education (PACE) innovative assessment system uses student scores from classroom performance assessments as well as other classroom tests for school accountability purposes. One concern is that not having annual state testing may incentivize schools and teachers away from teaching the breadth of…

School value-added models are widely applied to study, monitor, and hold schools to account for school differences in student learning. The traditional model is a mixed-effects linear regression of student current achievement on student prior achievement, background characteristics, and a school random intercept effect. The latter is referred to…

School accountability systems increasingly hold schools to account for their performances using value-added models purporting to measure the effects of schools on student learning. The most common approach is to fit a linear regression of student current achievement on student prior achievement, where the school effects are the school means of the…

Education officials have long hoped that the statewide academic assessments most students take each year could be used not only for accountability but also to guide instruction. Congress established the Innovative Assessment Demonstration Authority (IADA) program in 2015 to help address this goal, offering up to seven states temporary flexibility…

This appendix volume supplements "Evaluating the Federal Innovative Assessment Demonstration Authority: Early Implementation and Progress of State Efforts to Develop New Statewide Academic Assessments. Evaluation Report. NCEE 2023-004" analyzing the early progress of the first five assessment systems participating in the Innovative…

Education officials have long hoped that the statewide academic assessments most students take each year could be used not only for accountability but also to guide instruction. Congress established the Innovative Assessment Demonstration Authority (IADA) program in 2015 to help address this goal, offering up to seven states flexibility from…

While researchers have shown great interest in understanding teacher evaluation, little is known about how teachers' actions and interactions surrounding evaluation affect the dual goals of evaluation--accountability and development. Using data collected during a yearlong ethnographic study at three schools (combined with follow-up interviews four…

The purpose of the qualitative phenomenological study was to explore and understand the impact of standardized testing on educational practice in an urban, Title I school community, and to determine solutions to improve the utility of standardized testing in supporting student learning and achievement. The specific areas of focus are diagnosing…

Measures of student growth offer a richer understanding of student performance than a moment-in-time test score alone, but measures of student growth are not created equal. In their accountability plans for implementing the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), some states are using a sophisticated analysis of multiple data points that evaluate the…

This qualitative multiple case study was based on in-depth interviews with participants from three different schools. Each school used a different High-Stakes Accountability Model for teacher evaluation: RISE Evaluation and Development (RISE), Teacher Advancement Program (TAP), and Peer Assistance and Review (PAR). The purpose of this study was to…

As the higher education landscape has expanded beyond issues of access and affordability to include an emphasis on student completion and employment outcomes, accreditors can play a leadership role in advancing this important change. A shift to student success that rightfully centers in part on closing equity gaps between low-income students and…

In response to accountability systems dominated by external inspections and achievement data, calls are being made for "intelligent" accountability or a new accountability paradigm that focuses on "meaningful" learning, enabled by professionally skilled and committed educators within the system. In such systems, the actors are…

School ratings are a ubiquitous feature of the U.S. educational system. Alongside state-mandated measures of school performance, non-state organizations such as GreatSchools.org and Niche have created consumer-oriented systems of school ratings that draw on publicly available information about schools. Claiming the purpose of their rating systems…

As full-time virtual learning moved from the fringe to the mainstream in mid-March 2020, onlookers expressed concerns about access for learners and accountability for the learning itself. Concerns have not applied only to full-time virtual schools, however. Alternative schools that serve students who have dropped out or transferred from…

In Spring 2020, National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) convened a working group of authorizers and other stakeholders to learn more about the challenges they faced, given the data gaps caused by COVID-19, and to ask what guidance was needed for the sector to adapt to these unusual circumstances. Based on their feedback and…