From 2006 to 2008, Educational Testing Service (ETS) produced a series of reports titled "A Culture of Evidence," designed to capture a changing climate in higher education assessment. A decade later, colleges and universities already face new and different challenges resulting from societal, technological, and scientific influences.…

In "Holding Accountability to Account: How Scholarship and Experience in Other Fields Inform Exploration of Performance Incentives in Education"--a paper presented at the National Center on Performance Incentives research to policy conference in February--Richard Rothstein, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, argues educational…

Discussions were held with administrative staff and evaluators from the New York City Public Schools in order to identify sources of data for evaluating special education programs. Data which are generally available include: (1) citywide reading test scores; (2) number of diplomas issued; (3) number of students decertified; (4) number of students…

Education names and classifies individuals. This result seems unavoidable. For example, some students will graduate, and some will not. Those who graduate will be "graduates"; those who do not graduate will be labeled otherwise. The only way to avoid such labeling is to fail to make distinctions of any kind. Yet education is rife with…

This volume contains an edited transcript of the Rockefeller Institute's October 29, 2007 symposium (Chicago, IL) entitled "Intergovernmental Approaches to Strengthen K-12 Accountability Systems" as well as a framework paper circulated in preparation for the symposium. The transcript begins with a list of the forty state and federal education…

The value-added approach to the assessment of student outcomes examines actual or inferred changes in students' performance over time. It also attempts to separate the net effects of instruction from previous ability or simple maturation. Others may have different definitions of this concept, and this vagueness causes problems. Suggested ways to…

The author of this article challenges a common assumption made by both critics and defenders of standardized-testing technology (or psychometry), namely that standardized tests "measure" something (culture, ability, etc.). It argues that psychometric practice cannot be classified as a form of measurement and instead is best understood as…