In an October 22, 2010, speech to teacher educators at Columbia University's Teachers College, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan proclaimed that revolutionary change in the education of teachers is essential if the problems facing U.S. society and U.S. schools are to be solved. Toward the end of his speech, he declared that a standardized…

One of the goals in the Commission's Performance Assessment Framework for higher education is that all high school students in California receive an education that gives them the opportunity to enter a college or university. There are many possible measures that could be used to gauge preparation for higher education. These include SAT scores,…

The main goal of this report is to present evidence on the predictive validity of an English language arts (ELA) performance assessment (PA) administered in Grades 2-9 in a large urban school district. To account for the hierarchical structure of the data (students are nested within schools), we employed hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) to…

The aims of the report are threefold: (1) to assess the general level of social studies learning of seventh grade students in California public schools; (2) to provide a comparison of the general level of social studies learning to those of other curriculum areas; and (3) to provide a comparison of the relative level of social studies learning by…