In 2012, the United States Department of Education announced the Race to the Top-District grants. One joint award was made to two large educational cooperatives in the same state that together represented 111 mostly rural schools in 22 districts. One of the grant's identified four essential projects was the implementation of personalized learning.…

A new entry in the testing lexicon is through-course summative assessment, a system consisting of components administered periodically during the academic year. As defined in the Race to the Top program, these assessments are intended to yield a yearly summative score for accountability purposes. They must provide for both individual and group…

This resource was prepared in response to a request for information from a Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge (RTT-ELC) State about which RTT-ELC States are using the Pyramid Model for Supporting Social Emotional Competence in Infants and Young Children. The State also requested information about other projects States have designed to…

A fundamental aim of the Race to the Top agenda is to assess the effectiveness of teachers based on value-added growth measurement models of student achievement. However, in nontested grades and subject areas, such as music, alternative assessment types are being considered, including district-, school-, or teacher-developed measures. This article…

In the twenty-first century, the use of standardized tests as the primary means to evaluate schools and teachers in the United States has contributed to severe dilemmas, including misleading information on what students know, lower-level instruction, cheating, less collaboration, unfair treatment of teachers, and biased teaching. This article…

Recently, student outcomes have bubbled to the top of debates about how to evaluate teaching in community and liberal arts colleges, universities, and professional schools, but even more international attention has been riveted on how outcomes are being used to evaluate teachers and administrators K-12 (Harris, 2012; Rowen & Raudenbush, 2016;…

Passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in December 2015 signaled a new era for teacher evaluation reform. Under ESSA, states and districts have greater autonomy to design and implement teacher evaluation systems independent of federal influence. This new flexibility brings with it new responsibilities and challenges for states and…

This article describes how evidence-based theory fuels an audit culture for teacher education in the USA, placing faculty under monitoring and surveillance, and severely constraining judgment, discretion, and professional decision-making. The national education reform efforts, Race to the Top and Common Core State Standards, demand fealty to…

President Obama recently described America's current economic, societal, educational, and technological circumstances as "our generation's 'Sputnik' moment." If history repeats itself in the twenty-first century, music educators may face a situation similar to that which developed in the 1960s concerning the impact of education reform on…

This paper describes the experiences of preservice teachers developing deeper understanding of themselves and diverse students through participation in the Philadelphia Urban Seminar. The Seminar focuses on the reconstruction of more complete understanding of urban students and urban communities by combining field experience in Philadelphia with…

Even as the Internet and i-devices have changed so many parts of people's lives, educational testing has not changed substantially in decades. Though researchers and educators have for years raised ample concerns about existing tests, assessments have barely evolved. Further, despite years of expanded testing and greater school accountability,…

This publication describes new ways that States redesigning their educator effectiveness systems are measuring growth in student achievement, including value-added models and student learning objectives. The publication concludes with a brief discussion of communicating the results of student growth measures, such as monitoring correlations…

One objective of the U.S. Department of Education's (ED) School Improvement Grants (SIG) and Race to the Top (RTT) program is to help states enhance their capacity to support the turnaround of low-performing schools. This capacity may be important, given how difficult it is to produce substantial and sustained achievement gains in low-performing…

In response to the dearth of research agendas that connect teacher education and teaching in the field and to the call for more programmatic research, the purpose of this paper is to present the Agenda for Researching Teaching (ART). The ART is a visual research agenda that spans the time from a teacher candidate learning to teach to impacting…

The top priority for the U.S. Department of Education's new Race to the Top-District (RTT-D) competition is to create personalized-learning environments to bolster student achievement: "Absolute Priority 1: Personalized Learning Environments. To meet this priority, an applicant must coherently and comprehensively address how it will build on…