The purpose of this article was to offer guidance to educators in evaluating the strengths, weaknesses, and most effective uses of commercial reading assessment suites. We provide three resources to help educators who are responsible for making instructional decisions in reading using formal screening, benchmark, interim, and progress-monitoring…

This is the Mackinac Center's fourth school report card and covers elementary and middle schools. A similar report card was published in 2013, and this edition includes two years' worth of new data. A unique characteristic of this report card is that takes into consideration the "context" of a school when assessing its performance.…

This study examines the state's "Top-to-Bottom" ranking, which has been repeatedly criticized by educators for appearing to be correlated with school poverty rates. Mackinac Center research finds that schools that serve more lower-income students tend to receive lower scores on the TTB list. These results matters because TTB rankings are…

The Michigan Context and Performance Report Card measures school performance by adjusting standardized test scores to account for student background. Comparing schools using unadjusted test scores ignores the significant relationship between academic performance and student socioeconomic background--a dynamic outside a school's control. The…

This qualitative study illustrates the resilience and posttraumatic growth characteristics (PTG) that were present and distinguished in those children who showed the greatest improvement and sustained gains after completion of the I Feel Better Now! program compared to children who showed statistically significant improvement after program…

THE CITY READING PROGRAM FOR DETROIT WAS EVALUATED ON THE VERBAL COMPETENCE, INTEREST APPEAL FOR REREADING AND THE INFLUENCE ONCHILDREN'S ATTITUDES. THE PROGRAM INCLUDED A NEW SERIES OF TEXTBOOKS WHICH WERE SHORTER, SUSPENSEFUL AND STRESSED UNIQUE. VOCABULARY AND MIXED RACIAL SITUATIONS. THE ACCOMPANYING TEACHER'S MANUAL FOR THE PROGRAM PLACES…

The Kalamazoo school system has developed for its instructional staff a series of accountability schemes collectively referred to as the Instructional Staff Performance Profiles (ISPP). They presently include performance profiles for teachers, secondary instructional specialists, secondary academic specialists, elementary instructional…

Volume II contains six appendices to Volume I, including short summaries of the 18 schools that were studied. Appendices included in this report are: (1) Evaluation Methodology; (2) Promising Reform Strategies; (3) Descriptions of the Research-Based Methods or Strategies Being Used; (4) Short Summaries of 18 Comprehensive School Reform…

Comprehensive school reform calls for a "whole-school" and coordinated approach to improve schools. The strategy differs from piecemeal and fragmented efforts that also in the past have seemed only to lead to short-lived changes. To stimulate whole-school reform across the country, Congress appropriated funds in FY1998 for the U.S.…