The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) began a new wave of school accountability under which states draw on multiple measures to assess school quality. States have options in terms of how to weight components in their school quality indices and how many years of data to use to determine school ratings. In this study, we simulate school ratings…

Background/Context: The Race to the Top federal initiatives and requirements surrounding waivers of No Child Left Behind promoted expanded use of value-added models (VAMs) to evaluate teachers. Even after passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) relaxed these requirements, allowing more flexibility and local control, many states and…

Title I accountability requirements under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) represent the present-day instantiation of Lau, which requires schools to provide a program for English learners (ELs) that supports their meaningful engagement and to provide transparent information about EL program quality. This study uses critical policy analysis to…

The purpose of Project LISTO is to support the instructional capacity of science educators and to validate innovative practices and strategies via previously developed interventions that address literacy-infused science and technology integration with standards-aligned curriculum. The evaluation of LISTO involved a multisite cluster randomized…

There are many measures of student perceptions of school climate; accordingly, there is a staggering amount of research examining those perceptions and related outcomes. There is a comparatively small number of measures examining school personnel perceptions. Of those found, only some had evidence of measurement invariance/equivalence (MI/E). None…

In this overview piece, we document the six student perception surveys (SPSs) currently available for state, district, and school consumption and use, given SPSs are increasingly becoming one of the more popular "multiple measures" being used to evaluate teacher qualities. We present descriptive information about each of these SPSs,…

The use of assessment results to inform school accountability relies on the assumption that the test design appropriately represents the content and cognitive emphasis reflected in the state's standards. Since the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act and the certification of accountability assessments through federal peer review practices,…

The impetus for test-based accountability systems is to improve the educational opportunities afforded to all students so as to improve their learning; therefore, integral to the validity argument of these systems is the appraisal of test-based inferences and decisions in terms of their consequences. Both positive and negative consequences of…

California is taking a bold new approach to the evaluation of school performance, the provision of data to parents and educators, and the use of accountability to improve student learning. Broadly speaking, the state is stepping away from the consequential accountability that was compelled under No Child Left Behind and toward a system that relies…