This report offers state leaders key areas for action to continue progress in implementing evaluation systems, even as federal policies on teacher evaluation relax state requirements. The Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) offers its current best thinking for how state agencies can make the smartest use of funds, time and partners to refine…

A comprehensive assessment system is one in which three types of assessments: summative, benchmark, and formative assessments are routinely administered to all students in K-12 classrooms. The first part of this report summarizes the research on comprehensive assessment systems and provides clarity in terms of how each individual assessment type…

This fall, the nine states that finished as runners up in last year's groundbreaking Race to the Top competition will have an opportunity to reapply for a grant. The winners will receive a combined $200 million to help implement the bold education reform plans they developed last year. Many of the eligible states already have clear roadmaps toward…

The impact of education decentralization on high-quality education has been mixed at best. This can be attributed to a variety of factors including decentralization itself, ineffectual implementation, political-economic friction, and poor design. This paper focuses largely on the issue of design, contending that if governments or donors aim to…

Response to Intervention (RtI) has gained increased attention with the reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act. Since RtI was introduced at the policy level as a mechanism for use in the learning disability identification process, much of the implementation work has focused on this application. School-based…

In a 2012 paper for the Center for American Progress, "The State of Evaluation Reform," Patrick McGuinn (Drew University) identified the opportunities and challenges facing education agencies in Race to the Top (RTTT) grant-winning states as they prepared for the implementation of new teacher evaluation systems. The 2012 study undertook…

This study investigated outsourcing of the development of visual, animated and interactive learning objects for mathematics education by a Norwegian university to software vendors in China. It sought to understand the challenges in this outsourcing engagement and competences needed to meet the challenges. The authors tested outsourcing strategies…

This case study describes how Porterville Unified School District (PUSD), a rural school district in California's Central Valley, began to fulfill its vision to transform high school and career education through the implementation of Linked Learning. Linked Learning is a state-wide initiative for redesigning large comprehensive high schools into…

As more and more schools adopt school-wide positive behavior support (SWPBS) as a model for school improvement and the success of initial demonstration sites becomes evident, districts are faced with expansion and sustainability issues. Careful planning of these implementation efforts requires district personnel to be familiar with the resources…

Oregon State University (OSU) has held discussions over the past several years between Enrollment Services, Central Computing and the Finance Support Offices, and departments on campus that offer non-credit coursework, about the possibility of incorporating non-credit related records into the same information system that houses regular credit.…

In August 2000, twenty people met in a room in Boston to address two questions: (1) How can Boston create a network of community schools?; and (2) Does the action have to proceed one school at a time, or are there systematic changes that can advance the movement? For the next four years, these people worked together, without funding, a road map,…