The school quality assessment process under No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is criticized for oversimplifying and overemphasizing standardized test results and unfairly targeting diverse, urban schools. There has been much development in alternative test score evaluations, especially value-added models. These developments have tilted the public…

After passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in 2015, states assumed greater responsibility for designing their own accountability and assessment systems. ESSA requires states to measure "higher order thinking skills and understanding" and encourages the use of open-ended performance assessments, which are essential for…

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) opened up new possibilities for how student and school success are defined and supported in American public education. States have greater responsibility for designing and building their assessment and accountability systems. These new opportunities to develop performance assessments are critically important…

In accordance with the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law of 2001, 100% of students were expected to become proficient on state assessments of reading and mathematics by the end of 2013-2014 academic year. Schools that consistently failed to meet the NCLB's Adequate Yearly Progress requirements were subject to penalties. In 2011, the U.S.…

Some form of a short interrupted time series (ITS) is often used to evaluate state and national programs. An ITS design with a single treatment group assumes that the pretest functional form can be validly estimated and extrapolated into the postintervention period where it provides a valid counterfactual. This assumption is problematic. Ambiguous…

Prior to the mandatory testing and reporting required by the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), school improvement efforts were shown to lack coherence (Newman, Smith, Allensworth, & Bryk, 2001) and often included conflicting programs (Hatch, 2002). Part of the theory of performance-based accountability in general, and NCLB in particular, was…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to provide an empirical comparison of two measures of school success -- a value-added assessment system and the federally-mandated system of adequate yearly progress (AYP) -- to identify highly effective urban schools in the USA and to explore the predictive relationship between evidence-based decision-making…

A long standing debate among policymakers as well as researchers is whether and how funding affects the quality of education. Often missing from the discussion is information about the costs of providing education at the school level and below, yet such information could impart a better indication of the linkages between outcomes and resources…

The Voluntary Public School Choice (VPSC) Program supports the emergence and growth of choice initiatives across the country, by assisting states and local school districts in developing innovative strategies to expand public school choice options for students. This report contains the final assessment of the first five years of the VPSC Program…

Persons with intellectual disabilities have been integrated into post secondary education at increasing rates since the 1990s. Some colleges and universities have responded to the influx of this population by implementing specific programs designed to meet the needs of students who have intellectual disabilities. As many as 138 college campuses…

This report provides an annual overview of data reported by South Carolina's public institutions of higher education as part of institutional effectiveness reporting and as part of the process of performance funding. Prior to the January 2000 edition, this document was entitled "Minding Our P's and Q's: Indications of Productivity and Quality…

The assessment and evaluation programs of Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, and Michigan, and the development and implementation of steps they initiated to progress toward the goal of accountability are described in detail in this report. Following the introduction, section 2 discusses the laws enacted by the four states that are the basis for their…

This guide is intended to assist states and service delivery areas (SDAs) in addressing the new oversight responsibilities and opportunities stipulated by the Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA) with respect to net impact evaluations. It is divided into two main parts. The first part, which deals with issues in evaluating costs and benefits,…

Florida state legislation has mandated the evaluation of its compensatory education programs. The Florida Accountability Act of 1976 called for minimum basic skills testing in grades 3, 5, 8, and 11 (subsequently amended to grade 10). In 1977, the Florida Compensatory Education Act mandated remedial programs for students performing below the…

This document contains reports on the structures of qualification levels in Germany, Spain, France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom that were commissioned during a study to identify trends and developments in the European Union related to national certification frameworks. Each country report examines the following topics: the history of…