Student growth percentiles (SGPs) have become a common means to measure and report on student academic growth for state education accountability, and some states have adopted SGP cutscores as a means of classifying student growth into categories like "high/medium/low" growth. It has therefore become important to understand properties of…

Federal law requires that state accountability systems include "another academic indicator" for elementary and middle schools in addition to academic achievement. Nearly all states use a measure of student longitudinal growth as their other academic indicator. But how should states decide which growth model to use? The Center for…

School value-added models are widely applied to study, monitor, and hold schools to account for school differences in student learning. The traditional model is a mixed-effects linear regression of student current achievement on student prior achievement, background characteristics, and a school random intercept effect. The latter is referred to…

This biennial publication frames the most pressing challenges currently facing colleges and universities--those that demand the board's strategic oversight, vision, and accountability to advance excellence in governance and outcomes for students. The current competitive economic environment and polarized political climate present unique challenges…

School accountability systems increasingly hold schools to account for their performances using value-added models purporting to measure the effects of schools on student learning. The most common approach is to fit a linear regression of student current achievement on student prior achievement, where the school effects are the school means of the…

Higher education institutions face heightened accountability for student success. As such, higher education relies heavily on big data to predict student outcomes. This process is problematic because predictive models are developed on historical data, are deficit based, and are focused on student factors, neglecting institutional factors. The…

The Colorado Growth Model (CGM) was developed jointly by the Colorado Department of Education (CDE), the Technical Advisory Panel for Longitudinal Growth (TAP), and the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment (NCIEA). Its development was required by state statute (SB09-163) and assigned to the Technical Advisory Panel. The…

With the shift from No Child Left Behind (NCLB) to Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), accountability models are being changed. Given the past 15 years of reporting on student subgroups and 10 years using various growth models, accountability systems can now be better informed. In this study, we analyze identification and services of students with…

For this study, researchers critically reviewed documents pertaining to the highest profile of the 15 teacher evaluation lawsuits that occurred throughout the U.S. as pertaining to the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers. In New Mexico, teacher plaintiffs contested how they were being evaluated and held accountable using a homegrown…

Education systems focus on issues related to school effects and differences. School effects are used as a basis for accountability in various countries including China. This study investigated the stability and cross-disciplinary consistency of value-added estimates based on student scores in selected schools in a city in central China. The…

The Every Students Succeeds Act (ESSA) loosened the federal policy grip over states' teacher accountability systems. We present information, collected via surveys sent to state department of education personnel, about all states' teacher evaluation systems post-ESSA, while also highlighting differences before and after ESSA. We found that states…

This study explores the characteristics of the teacher evaluation model in Finland. Highlighting the unique qualities of the Finnish case, we also compare these teacher evaluation practices with the increasingly applied value-added model (VAM) for teacher evaluation across the globe. Our analysis revealed that the Finnish Model prioritises teacher…

While numerous recent authors have studied the effects of school accountability systems on student test performance, there has been very little research with regards to school mobility with school performance grades in an A-F system. For the purpose of this study, mobility is defined as a school's ability to have an increase or decrease in their…

Various changes in the spheres of education policy and school management over recent decades have sparked a renewed interest in the issue of school culture and its potential to understand processes of leadership and academic performance. What are the contributions and potentialities of organizational culture for understanding school organizations…

This article begins by thinking about the process of accreditation in general and examining whether it is a transactional or value-added activity. The overall systems of U.S accreditation and National Association for Developmental Education (NADE) accreditation are reviewed.