With the passage of the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), states were required to add a fifth indicator on "School Quality or Student Success" (SQSS) to their school accountability systems. An analysis of submitted ESSA state plans found that 13 states included measures of school climate as their SQSS indicator or incorporated…

U.S. school districts have taken widely varied approaches to reopening public schools for the 2020-2021 school year. The divergence stems from the highly localized approach to both schooling and addressing the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and differences in COVID-19 transmission rates among communities. To develop a national…

The Oregon Statewide Report Card is an annual publication required by law (ORS 329.115), which reports on the state of public schools and their progress towards the goals of the Oregon Educational Act for the 21st Century. The purpose of the Oregon Report Card is to monitor trends among school districts and Oregon's progress toward achieving the…

Effective evidence-based action requires getting the right data into the right hands at the right time to help make decisions. The Data Quality Campaign (2011) has provided suggestions to state education agencies for effectively using data within state longitudinal data systems. One suggestion is to identify "the variety of ways available…

Value-added models help to evaluate the knowledge that school districts, schools, and teachers add to student learning as students progress through school. In this article, the well-known Education Value-Added Assessment System (EVAAS) is examined. The author presents a practical investigation of the methodological issues associated with the…

The National Forum on Education Statistics (Forum) is a cooperative of state, local, and federal education agencies. The goal of Forum activities is to improve the quality of education data gathered for use by policymakers and programmatic decision-makers. One approach to furthering this goal has been to pool the collective experiences of Forum…

This paper examines long-range problems caused by test-controlled schooling. It looks at the demands of both curricular and accountability uses of tests from the point of view of the urban school district's testing office. On the basis of interviews with 12 New Orleans teachers and the experiences of the authors in working in two large city…

California State Proposition 98 requires the governing boards of California school districts to prepare and issue an annual School Accountability Report Card for each elementary and high school under their jurisdiction, beginning in the school year 1989-90. The report card must assess a minimum of 13 specified conditions. This manual provides…

The Program of Research and Evaluation for Public Schools (PREPS) model is unique because all research and evaluation activities are conceived, conducted, and controlled by the local public schools, members of the consortium. It is a delivery system designed to improve school effectiveness. PREPS was developed as a result of the demand for school…

This paper examines trends in the use of research and evaluation resources in the Dallas (Texas) Independent School District (DISD) and in other school districts throughout the country. First, the organization and functions of the Department of Research, Evaluation, and Audit of the DISD are presented and compared to those of 7 years ago. Second,…

Analysis of several national surveys found that states collect a tremendous amount of data on educational outcomes, but little on the status of students with disabilities. Trends toward increasing local control concerning decisions of testing participation and accommodation strategies were found. The need for carefully planned inclusion of…

This paper describes an evaluation model developed by the Ontario Ministry of Education and illustrates how it was adapted to meet local and provincial needs of the Scarborough School System for accountability data and direction for change. The basic Cooperative Evaluation and Development of School Systems (CEDSS) model includes five stages of…

In 1984 the Education Department (ED) began to monitor state education agencies' (SEA) administration of the education block grant known as "Chapter 2." ED staff visited 21 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico and found many serious problems among the SEAs and local education agencies (LEAs). The problems are divided into…

The study reported in this paper builds upon earlier research designed to examine issues associated with initiating an effective teacher evaluation effort and integrating it into district practices. The paper describes four districts which have made substantial progress in initiating and organizing teacher evaluation programs and presents the view…