Education today is evolving to foster essential psychosocial skills like creativity, critical thinking, and responsibility, equipping students for 21st-century challenges. However, it is crucial to examine the motivations driving these changes and their alignment with broader societal goals beyond merely economic interests. This article explores…

Early education programs are increasingly being promoted by states and the federal government as an integral part of their efforts to ensure that all children enter school ready to learn. As these programs and their enrollments have grown in recent years, so too have efforts to monitor their quality and performance. A common focus is on…

Roughly 270,000 school-aged youth were in foster care at the end of fiscal year 2017. Youth in foster care may change schools frequently, which can negatively affect their academic achievement. The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), enacted in 2015, reauthorized the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 and included provisions to improve…

Across the nation, states and districts are in the process of building better teacher evaluation systems that not only identify highly effective teachers but also systematically provide data and feedback that can be used to improve teacher practice. The "Practical Guide to Designing Comprehensive Teacher Evaluation Systems" is a tool…

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) of 2015 (Public Law 114-95) requires each state to create a plan for its statewide accountability system. In particular, ESSA calls for state plans that include strategies for reporting education outcomes by grade for all students and for economically disadvantaged students, students from major racial and…

States and districts have launched unprecedented efforts in recent years to build new feedback and evaluation systems that support teacher growth and development. These systems depend on trustworthy information about teaching effectiveness--information that recognizes the complexity of teaching and is trusted by both teachers and administrators.…

This report highlights 10 of the most advanced and talked-about teacher evaluation systems nationally: Delaware; Rhode Island; Tennessee; Hillsborough County, Florida; Houston, Texas; New Haven, Connecticut; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Washington, DC (referred to throughout just as Washington); Achievement First (a charter management organization,…

As the education reform movement increasingly focuses on teachers and teaching, educators, policy-makers, and researchers need valid and reliable measures that can be used to evaluate individual teachers, provide guidance for improving teaching performance, and support research in ways that advance instruction and classroom dialog and practice. A…

Many existing teacher evaluation and reward systems do not capture variation in teachers' ability to improve student performance on standardized tests. Improved access to longitudinal data systems that link teachers to students facilitates the development of systems that incorporate student achievement gains into teacher evaluations. However, two…

Publicly reporting timely, actionable, and comprehensible data is one of the most powerful ways states can promote transparency, strengthen accountability, and ensure that everyone with a stake in education--parents, educators, policymakers, researchers, and members of the public and press-- has access to the information they need to make good…

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) were created in response to the shortcomings of No Child Left Behind era standards and assessments. Among those failings were the poor quality of content standards and assessments and the variability in content expectations and proficiency targets across states, as well as concerns related to the economic…

The authors of this monograph assert that by assisting school systems to more closely resemble "high reliability" organizations (HROs) that already exist in other industries and benchmarking against top-performing education systems from around the globe, America's school systems can transform themselves from compliance-driven…

This chapter describes the development of a state-level student tracking system that enables the state and institutions to follow various cohort types of students across institutional boundaries. The system was developed by the Policy Research and Data Warehousing section of the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV). SCHEV is the…

In today's economy, employers increasingly demand that workers have a high school diploma, yet America's graduation rates are unacceptably low, particularly among poor and minority students. Nationally, only about 70 percent of students graduate from high school on time with a regular diploma; for African American and Hispanic students, this…

Quality measures were originally developed for research aimed at describing the settings that children spend time in and identifying the characteristics of these environments that contribute to children's development. They were also developed to guide improvements in practice. Increasingly, however, measures of quality are being used for further…