Many states and school districts are rethinking how they do educational assessment. A few are going further: attempting to build "balanced," "comprehensive," or "next-generation" assessment systems. At the same time, practitioners and researchers have long mulled the purposes and parts such systems should have. But…

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…

Student achievement depends upon successful passage through a series of transitions: elementary to middle school, middle school to high school, high school to college. Increasing the efficiency of successful transitions requires the collection and analysis of student data across these transition points. Yet long-standing separations between…

In 2001, Indiana officials at the Department of Education were taking stock. The schools had an excellent network infrastructure and had installed significant numbers of computers for 1 million public school enrollees. Yet students were spending less than an hour a week on the computer. It was then that state officials knew each student needed a…

The Alabama Learning Exchange (ALEX; www.alex.state.al.us) is a network-based education system designed and implemented to help improve education in Alabama. It accomplishes this goal by providing a single location for the state's K-12 educators to find information that will help improve their classroom effectiveness. The ALEX system includes…