"No Child Left Behind" (NCLB) dictates students in Grades 3, 5, and 8 pass state tests to be promoted. Accordingly, most state education codes require students to pass reading and math exams for promotion. The majority of those who fail, however, appear to be promoted anyway. This article addresses core questions concerning the paradigm…

This study describes enrollment and achievement trends of limited English proficient (LEP) students in New Jersey public schools between 2002/03 and 2008/09. It documents achievement gaps between LEP and general education students in language arts literacy and math. The study's main findings include: (1) From 2002/03 to 2008/09, LEP student…

Nearly four years after a front-page story in "The New York Times" sparked a fierce debate by suggesting that charter school students nationally were lagging academically behind their peers in regular public schools, the national testing program that informed the controversy has generated far more data for researchers and advocates to scrutinize.…

At a time when many states are ratcheting up their high school graduation requirements, critics say Louisiana's new "career diploma" appears to represent a lowering of standards and expectations for students who are not headed to a four-year college. But some state education leaders who had misgivings with the legislative effort this…

When a state test and National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) are both measuring the same construct, the achievement gaps between subgroups on both tests should be the same. However, if a teacher or school engages in "teaching to the test" then student performance may improve on one test but not on another. We hypothesized that…

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is an ongoing, congressionally mandated national survey of the knowledge, skills, and understanding of young Americans in major subjects usually taught in school. This document is a guide to the files of the first NAEP Trial State Assessment (1990). The Trial State Assessment collected…

This bulletin is intended to provide a brief summary of the California Assessment Program (CAP) testing results for the 1986-87 school year. General comments regarding testing in San Diego (California), commonly asked questions, and school- and district-level results are provided. Tabulated results cover mean scale scores for grades 3, 6, and 8…

This report describes the results of the October, 1987, state assessment of basic skills of all Washington public school students in grades 4, 8, and 10. More than 152,000 students were tested using the Metropolitan Achievement Tests, Sixth Edition. The first section of the report describes the general state level results for the involved grades.…

This booklet contains the 14 exercises that are used in the Bloomington, Minnesota, school system's writing assessment program. Depending on their applicability, the exercises may be used to assess the writing performance of fourth-, eighth-, or eleventh-grade students. Thirteen of the exercises are from the National Assessment of Educational…

This summary of the Bloomington, Minnesota, public schools writing assessment program includes background information about the selection of exercises that assessed fourth-, eighth-, and eleventh-grade students' writing abilities, a list of these exercises that were used, and information about the students who were assessed. The results of the…

Pennsylvania Governor Dick Thornburgh initiated an education reform package, "Turning the Tide: An Agenda for Excellence in Pennsylvania Public Schools" in October 1983. The statewide competency testing program which followed was "Testing for Essential Learning and Literacy Skills (TELLS), and it tested reading and mathematics…

This report, submitted to the U.S. Department of Education, contains summary details of Delaware students' growth in the areas of reading, mathematics, writing, science and social studies. The results reported herein are part of a long-term effort to gather data on Delaware students' educational progress and use the data to inform decisions about…

This document presents 10 papers concerning the 1990 Trial State Assessment, which was restricted to the eighth-grade public school population in 37 states, the District of Columbia, and 2 U.S. territories. The following are the papers: (1) "A Critique of Sampling in the 1990 Trial State Assessment" (Bruce D. Spencer); (2)…

In response to state mandates, the Hawaii Department of Education (HDE) began reporting on the current achievement status and progress of students scoring in the lowest three stanines of the Stanford Achievement Tests (SAT). The Longitudinal Student Achievement Monitoring (LSAM) process is described and evaluated; it was established to monitor low…

Results of the fifth year of testing by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction are presented. In 1980, objective-referenced tests in mathematics and reading were given to a sample of Wisconsin's public school students in grades 4, 8, and 12. Students were also given the Comprehensive Tests of Basic Skills (CTBS) in mathematics, reading,…