School improvement plans (SIPs) have become a central feature of schooling. Educational leaders experience tension between balancing compliance with accountability demands and continuous improvement, and neither of these lenses is centered in the social justice necessary for closing opportunity gaps. We propose a new rubric for assessing the…

Preparing to become a music teacher educator is a complex process and one component of this process should be learning to model, demonstrate, and teach assessment practices to preservice music educators. The purpose of this exploratory qualitative study was to discover how, and to what extent, music teacher educators (MTEs) are educated about…

Teacher evaluation systems introduced by states and school systems in the past several years have focused attention on improving the performance of public school teachers, but they have been cost- and time-intensive, placing a significant burden on states' and districts' resources. In Tennessee, for example, trained evaluators conducted nearly…

This publication summarizes the key discussion from experts in the field of measuring student growth during a convening held February 2015. Experts heard about two emerging approaches to measuring growth: Portfolios of student work samples and unit value-added models that provide teachers with timely and actionable feedback that they can use to…

This publication examines how some States and local educational agencies (LEAs) are implementing teacher evaluations that incorporate measures of student achievement. The information in this publication was collected in response to a technical assistance request to the Reform Support Network from Maryland. Education leaders charged with designing…

States, programs, and schools have long focused on the inputs of teacher preparation--the rules for candidates and the preparation programs they attend--because inputs were thought to predict teacher effectiveness, and because they were often the best option available. But in the early 2000s, policymakers began trying to evaluate preparation…

Despite policy efforts to encourage multiple measures of performance in newly developing teacher evaluation systems, practical constraints often result in evaluations based predominantly on formal classroom observations. Yet there is limited knowledge of how these observational measures relate to student achievement. This article leverages the…

In a recent report entitled "All Together Now: Collaboration and Innovation for Youth Engagement,": the Commission on Youth Voting & Civic Knowledge concluded that civic education is a shared responsibility of schools and other institutions. Data suggests, however, that more work is required to provide all young people with the…

Preparing the next generation of Americans to engage in their communities civically and politically is a shared responsibility. Although civic education takes place every day in homes and community centers, our nation's K-12 schools are in a unique position to nurture and reinforce the civic development of all young people. States influence their…

In 2010, HCM Strategists received support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to engage academic researchers in identifying and discussing the best currently available ways to account for differences in college "inputs"--students, resources, and fixed characteristics--when evaluating postsecondary outcomes. The project, Context…

Each year, the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) publishes the "State Teacher Policy Yearbook," a comprehensive examination of the state laws, rules and regulations that govern the teaching profession, measured against a realistic set of reform goals. For five years running, the full "Yearbook" compendium…

This report highlights 10 of the most advanced and talked-about teacher evaluation systems nationally: Delaware; Rhode Island; Tennessee; Hillsborough County, Florida; Houston, Texas; New Haven, Connecticut; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Washington, DC (referred to throughout just as Washington); Achievement First (a charter management organization,…

Career and technical education (CTE) is increasingly seen as a major potential contributor to the recovery of the U.S. economy. However, the effectiveness and impact of the current Carl D. Perkins Act (otherwise known as Perkins IV) that governs CTE are unclear. Is the federal investment in CTE paying off? To answer this, we need to establish the…

The U.S. Department of Education (Education) established the Race to the Top (RTT) grant fund to encourage states to support school reform efforts. In 2010, Education awarded 12 RTT grants totaling nearly $4 billion, making RTT the largest competitive grant fund ever administered by Education. Individual grantee awards ranged from $75 million to…

Until recently, states focused on ensuring the presence of a "highly qualified teacher" in every classroom. Under the 2001 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB), this title described a teacher holding at least a bachelor's degree and the appropriate state license and…