The Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE), like other state education agencies, recognizes that a key lever to turning around low-performing schools is the quality of instruction and thus embeds a schoolwide instructional quality measure into its monitoring process. Massachusetts' schoolwide quality instruction…

Continuous improvement is a holistic and research-based approach to education grounded in the belief that every system is designed to achieve the results it gets; therefore, change must be systemwide, not piecemeal. California is a national leader in the continuous improvement movement that is spreading throughout local school districts as well as…

Since Congress has passed the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) states are revamping their federally required systems to measure school quality and hold schools accountable for performance. However, most are doing so using outdated assumptions, holdovers from the Industrial Era, when cookie-cutter public schools followed orders from central…

This paper analyzes the lasting impacts of a project aimed at teaching children how to read and write at age 6. Using a Difference-in-Differences methodology, the results show that it is not enough to get children literate at age 6 to secure lasting effects; the instruction process is also an important factor: Only pupils exposed to the Phonics…

The purpose of this report is to summarize the key elements of school and district level Performance Index scores (PI scores) for the 50 states and the District of Columbia (D.C.) across the United States. PI scores are partial or overall summative ratings of schools or districts currently used across US state accountability systems to assess…

States are required by federal law to create annual report cards for the public with key data about how their students and schools are doing. The Data Quality Campaign (DQC) decided to find out if these report cards are easily found and understood. In summer 2016, DQC took the following steps: (1) reviewed 51 report cards (all 50 states and the…

Massachusetts is one of a handful of states that is often recognized as a leader in public education, and for good reason. The Commonwealth consistently outperforms most states on national reading and math tests and often leads the pack in education innovations. "Starting Young: Massachusetts Birth-3rd Grade Policies that Support Children's…

This report is in response to the requirement of RCW 28A.150.550 that the State Board of Education, with assistance from the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI), the Workforce Training and Education Coordinating Board (WTECB), the Educational Opportunity Gap Oversight and Accountability Committee (EOGOAC), and the Washington…

Schools to Watch (STW) is an initiative of the National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform that identifies high performing middle grades schools based on 37 criteria. Initiated in 2003, California's program, Schools to Watch--Taking Center Stage (STW-TCS), has designated 36 schools. This report describes STW nationally and in California,…

The state's Race to the Top (RTT) application requires changes to the state's evaluation/accountability system. It requires a teacher effectiveness measure, district effectiveness measure, leader effectiveness measure. Regarding the teacher effectiveness measure, RTT requires linking the data of individual students to individual teachers as part…

In 2004, Kuss Middle School became the first school declared "Chronically Underperforming" by the state of Massachusetts. But by 2010, Kuss had transformed itself into a model for schools around the country seeking a comprehensive turnaround strategy. Kuss is using increased learning time as the primary catalyst to accelerate learning,…

Student success is at the heart of both institutional effectiveness and the community college mission, yet measuring such success at community colleges is problematic. This article highlights three efforts to grapple with this problem--a multistate work group of system- and state-level policymakers to create an improved set of student success…

"Straight A's: Public Education Policy and Progress" is a biweekly newsletter that focuses on education news and events both in Washington, DC and around the country. The following articles are included in this issue: (1) Another Positive Step for ESEA Reauthorization: Testifying Before Congress, Duncan Calls for Reauthorization in 2010,…

Across the country, schools operate on a schedule of about 180 six-hour days. This is not because they think it is the best schedule or the right schedule but because it has been in place for generations and would be difficult to change. But does this schedule really provide enough time to help all students achieve academic proficiency? The…

This study compares the perceptions of two groups of West Virginia school principals about the performance of their schools. Six hundred principals were sent an online, 70-item survey instrument aligned with the seven domains of the state's Framework for High-Performing Schools. Of the total 600 principals in the study, half had attended the West…