This report summarizes the deliberations and recommendations of the California Advisory Task Force on Alternative Schools (Task Force). The Task Force is a public service project of the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and their Communities at Stanford University and is convened in collaboration with the California Department of Education (CDE). A…

This fall, the nine states that finished as runners up in last year's groundbreaking Race to the Top competition will have an opportunity to reapply for a grant. The winners will receive a combined $200 million to help implement the bold education reform plans they developed last year. Many of the eligible states already have clear roadmaps toward…

The impact of education decentralization on high-quality education has been mixed at best. This can be attributed to a variety of factors including decentralization itself, ineffectual implementation, political-economic friction, and poor design. This paper focuses largely on the issue of design, contending that if governments or donors aim to…

Since the break up of the USSR, its former republics have seen the emergence and rapid expansion of an examinations industry that was, to all intents and purposes, unknown in Soviet times. New national assessment agencies have been established and been charged with, amongst other things, developing high-stakes exams to replace the diverse and…

America can no longer afford an education system that fails to use data effectively to guide decisionmaking. The education sector is facing ever-increasing demands to improve student outcomes, reduce burden, increase efficiency, and improve transparency. These demands cannot be met without the strategic and effective use of data. Due to the…

Central Arizona College (CAC) has leveraged EMSI to design the most effective regional strategies for academic/economic prediction analysis. Accessing current and reliable data on occupations, skills requirements, and demographics, CAC can extract, analyze, and present this data to academic programs, advisory boards, economic development councils,…

Discusses shaping educational accountability systems in the context of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. Suggests ways in which evaluation can contribute to improving and changing accountability systems, especially through the development of standards. (SLD)

This paper is meant to help designers of educational accountability systems think more critically about the questions they want to ask schools and the kinds of analyses that best answer these questions. There are two essential questions in school evaluation: how good is this school, and is it getting better? Each of these questions then can be…

Highlights the development of a data management system to facilitate service delivery by the career planning and placement department at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. Recounts the development of the system, providing the context for data management and describing the issues associated with building and implementing a data model, and the…

Almost every state has in place a state assessment and accountability system. These systems vary greatly in their characteristics but share a common global purpose of improving teaching and learning. Some of the variations in the state systems are discussed and illustrated with examples from selected states. Issues that are critical to the value…

The Department of Education has begun a project to redesign the information systems used to deliver student financial aid funds to students, postsecondary institutions, lenders, and state guarantee agencies. The implications of this strategy are considered. (MLW)

Outlines the author's participation in several programs designed to effect change in educational institutions. Observations regarding school decentralization, community participation, and staff development programs are presented. (APM)

Describes a study of the culture of collaboration in the accounting industry. Topics include previous research on collaboration in organic organizational contexts, information gathering collaboration, knowledge giving and getting, accountability sharing, trust sharing, transboundary communication, information technology, and implications for…

The Educational Quality Indicators initiative, a 3-year collaboration between Alberta Education and 12 school districts, generated 10 action research projects that developed educational indicator systems with a broad range of student outcomes, methods of data collection and interpretation, and outcomes reporting. Field testing of these systems…

This paper describes an educational accountability system that provides needed accountability along with the data necessary for school improvement. The accountability system, which is being implemented in the Dallas (Texas) schools, is a three-tier system moving from the school level through district improvement plans to school improvement…