Recent years have produced a surge in interest in improving state assessment programs. Many states are designing new assessments. Much of this innovation is aimed at addressing longstanding areas of unhappiness with typical domain-sampled, end-of-year state assessments: States want to streamline assessment activities, enhance the instructional…

Even as the Internet and i-devices have changed so many parts of people's lives, educational testing has not changed substantially in decades. Though researchers and educators have for years raised ample concerns about existing tests, assessments have barely evolved. Further, despite years of expanded testing and greater school accountability,…

This survey of 34 primary schools and 5 local education authorities in Great Britain examined reactions to the pilot test of Key Stage 1 standard assessment tasks (SATs), as they related to special needs students. Teachers' criticisms focused on the overwhelming workload, questionable SAT reliability, and resulting decline in the quality of…

School districts are increasingly initiating random drug-testing (RDT) programs in an effort to curb substance-use rates among students, yet little is known about student attitudes toward RDT and potential obstacles to program acceptance and effectiveness. The authors surveyed 1011 9th through 11th grade students in 2 rural high schools in North…

This report is designed to provide New Jersey Congressional legislators with current information on the effectiveness of the Education Consolidation and Improvement Act of 1981 (ECIA) Chapter 1 Program in New Jersey. Data on the reading and mathematics performance of ECIA Chapter 1 students in grades 2 through 8 from participating districts were…

The effectiveness of the Second Language Institutes, summer programs designed to instruct educators of limited English proficient children in languages, cultural awareness, and assessment methods, was evaluated. Data were collected through site observation and interviews, and questionnaires completed by institute participants and their…

The status of remedial programs in New Jersey's public colleges is analyzed in this report for fall 1981. Following introductory material on New Jersey's basic skills assessment program, the character of the state's remedial programs is examined, focusing on the number of students tested, identification of students needing remediation, placement…

This document is the third annual status report of the Spencerport (New York) More Effective Schools/Teaching Project. Section 1 describes nine documents developed during the project; identifies persons participating in the project; states the applicability of effective schools research to all levels of a suburban school system; and sets forth the…

Accuracy in the scoring of writing is critical if standardized tasks are to be used in a national assessment scheme. Three approaches to establishing accuracy (i.e., consensus, consistency, and measurement) exist and commonly large-scale assessment programs of primary school writing demonstrate adjacent agreement consensus rates of between 80% and…

Calls for accountability in America's schools have created increased responsibilities for educational leaders. In this article, we describe and discuss a study of elementary, middle, and high school principals' perceptions of the state-wide educational accountability program in North Carolina. The respondents indicated that the state's…

The "No Child Left Behind Act" of 2001 crystallized the concern for accountability in education. National testing was mandated as a way to improve the "broken" educational system. Publicly funded early education programs were not spared from such testing. While the positive effects of high-quality early education on children's…

This paper reports a 2-year study of education policy that sought to identify, describe, and analyze the essential building blocks of state-level education policy and to discover the factors responsible for creating differences among states in their use of these elements to construct an overall framework for school regulation and support. Sample…

The statement presents a consensus of what South Carolina educators expect children to know and be able to do in foreign languages, and the changes needed in the educational system to support what teachers and students do in the classroom. It is not a curriculum guide, but is intended for use by policymakers, instructional leaders, teachers, and…

This document contains nine papers devoted to the labor market problems faced by out-of-school and other disadvantaged young people in the United States and policy options and strategies for addressing those problems. The papers update the data on out-of-school young adults, review the lessons learned from past youth programs and policies,…