Candi Mascia Reed is a retired principal of programs for deaf and hard of hearing students in the Total Communication programs of Bergen County Special Services in the Hackensack School District in New Jersey. Currently, she is an adjunct professor at The College of New Jersey, Special Education Language and Literacy, Deaf Education Teacher…

In the past decade, there has been important progress in the development and validation of video-based instruments that enable the systematic assessment of teaching competence with large samples of teachers, across multiple settings and populations, and by researchers other than the developers. This commentary focuses on the methodological…

Nationally, results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP; NCES, 2013) exams in mathematics and reading indicate no significant improvement over time in the percentage of students scoring at advanced levels in any age group. While progress is being made in raising the achievement of students in the lowest 10%, the achievement of…

Determining the effectiveness of physical education teachers is a difficult process complicated by the expectations of the building principals, the extensiveness of national and state standards, student ability levels, and the severely limited time that the programs are allotted. The dearth of effective, efficient evaluation tools lends itself to…

In this article, the authors provide a methodological critique of the current standard of value-added modeling forwarded in educational policy contexts as a means of measuring teacher effectiveness. Conventional value-added estimates of teacher quality are attempts to determine to what degree a teacher would theoretically contribute, on average,…

The author discusses how educational reformers have encouraged states across the country, as a requirement to be eligible for Race to the Top money, to measure teacher and school quality through value-added measurements. The idea behind value-added measurements is that a computer can take all the information about a class of students and determine…

Recent educational accountability efforts have married student assessments with reform mandates and sanctions. As a result, students--beginning in early elementary grades--are feeling the pressures of this new era of high-stakes accountability. This article chronicles a story of the consequences of high-stakes testing on a father and his son.…

The REL Mid-Atlantic Webinar discussed the elements in a positive school climate and shared different methods for assessing school data, including the Comprehensive School Climate Inventory. The Q&A presented in this document address the questions participants had for Dr. Cohen following the webinar. The webinar recording and PowerPoint…

This commentary reflects upon Lazar Stankov's thesis which regards "unforgiving nature of Confucian Asian societies" as the driving force underpinning academic success of students from these societies. The commentary considers theoretical perspectives put forward by Jian Wang and Emily Lin (2008), and by Chiu and Klassen (2010) as two alternative…

Much grading of student work is based, overtly or tacitly, on assumptions derived from scientific measurement. However, the practice of grading and the cumulation of grades into an overall index of achievement are socially constructed activities that fall a long way short of what is expected of scientific measurement. If scientific measurement is…

We argue that once we take into account the students' rational enrollment decisions, mismatch in the sense that the intended beneficiary of affirmative action admission policies are made worse off could occur only if selective universities possess private information about students' post-enrollment treatment effects. This necessary condition for…

In all the elementary schools in the county, benchmark assessments were given six times a year in math and three times in reading; they were modeled after the questions anticipated on the Maryland School Assessment (MSA). Although results were sent to the school board, there were no cosmic consequences for the hourlong tests; they were supposed to…

This article is about the changes in educational reform that have adversely affected teachers and their principals. With the new evaluation system, teachers and school leaders will be evaluated partially on student success. Other educational reforms include the discontinuing of New York State Regents Exams in January and in August. A…

The focus article "Road Maps for Learning: A Guide to the Navigation of Learning Progressions" by Black, Wilson, and Yao (this issue) is a veritable tour-de-force, covering a great deal of education ground while spanning the heights from models of the interplay among curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment to interpretations of student…

This paper concentrates on the public and formal processes of reporting achievement. The topic is significant because employers, managers and graduate schools all use warrants when making selection and governance decisions. Should those warrants turn out to have, as we argue, local meanings, then selection and governance practices, amongst others,…