Sociology faculty are accountable to multiple stakeholders to demonstrate that our academic programs are effective and that students are learning. Despite the ubiquity of mandated program review practices, which often include the assessment of student learning, research is lacking on the extent to which these efforts lead to improvements in…

The Region 15 Comprehensive Center (R15CC) is federally funded to provide high-impact, customized, and responsive capacity-building technical assistance to state educational agencies (SEAs) in Arizona, California, Nevada, and Utah. In 2022, R15CC established a regional Family and Community Engagement (FACE) Collaborative for SEA leaders in…

Accountability mechanisms and processes have evolved with changes in statute. State Education Agency (SEA) accountability systems may exhibit characteristics of compliance- and/or improvement-focused systems in light of requirements under the "Elementary and Secondary Education Act" (ESEA) and its reauthorizations under the…

The "Forum Guide to Data Literacy" is designed to help education agencies understand and build data literacy skills among various stakeholder groups such as administrators, teachers, students, parents and other caregivers, school board members, legislators, and community groups. This resource defines and discusses the importance of data…

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) directs states to create report cards that are easy for parents and the public to access and understand. Additionally, states are required to provide more school-level data than ever before by highlighting multiple indicators of student performance, funding, teacher quality, post-secondary success, and more…

State report cards should help families, educators, policymakers, and other critical stakeholders in various states understand and act on education information for schools, school districts, and states as a whole. While each state finds itself in a different place regarding its own progress in building state report cards with such an impact,…

This report presents data collected through a questionnaire of State education agencies and local educational agencies on the growing use of social media to reach key stakeholder groups and engage with primary audiences.

The recommendations and questions in this report enumerate key factors that may help a department answer the most important question about a graduate program: does it give its students the time and resources necessary to complete their degrees in a timely fashion? This document offers best practices in seven general areas for improving the…