When congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), standardized testing in public schools became the law of the land. The ambitious legislation identified test-based accountability as the key to improving schools and, by extension, the long-term prospects of American schoolchildren. Thirteen years later, the debate over the federal…

There is no comprehensive database of U.S. district-level test scores that is comparable across states. We describe and evaluate a method for constructing such a database. First, we estimate linear, reliability-adjusted linking transformations from state test score scales to the scale of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). We…

The Office of Shared Accountability (OSA) in Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) conducted a linking study to examine the relationship of the Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) assessment with the Common Core Consortia Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) assessment in the 2014-2015 school year. This is the…

When using time series accountability data to evaluate system-wide education policies, concurrent changes often pose threats to internal validity. The standard difference-in-differences (DID) method resorts to a non-equivalent comparison group whose average outcome change is due to such confounding. This strategy relies on the strong assumption…

In the fall of 2011, the state of Nebraska experienced a watershed moment in public education: results of the first standardized mathematics achievement test administered to all students in grades 3-8 and 11 the previous spring (2011) were reported to the public. One state senator referred to some of the results as "shocking." Only four…

This evaluation study provides information about the implementation and outcomes of the 21st Century Community Learning Centers (21st CCLC) program in West Virginia, from September 2014 through May 2015. The report draws on information from online surveys of 23 directors of 21st CCLC programs and from school teachers for 929 of the 11,299…

If teacher value-added estimates (VAEs) are to be used as indicators of individual teacher performance in teacher evaluation and accountability systems, it is important to understand how much VAEs are affected by the data and model specifications used to estimate them. In this study we explored the effects of three conditions on the stability of…

My dissertation investigates the effects of education policy on academic achievement. I focus on state and federal policies that seek to influence how teachers and school administrators educate their students, and I evaluate those policies' effects on academic achievement. Chapter 1 examines the effects of a compositional shift in a school's…

Using the nationally representative, cohort-based data of the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS:02), this study employs multiple regression to examine the effects of exit exams on student achievement and school completion. This study finds that exit exams as a whole do not have substantial effects on student achievement in mathematics,…

This "Practitioner's Guide to Growth Models," commissioned by the Technical Issues in Large-Scale Assessment (TILSA) and Accountability Systems & Reporting (ASR), collaboratives of the "Council of Chief State School Officers," describes different ways to calculate student academic growth and to make judgments about the…