Across the United States, school districts are adopting benchmark assessments to help teachers modify instruction over the course of a school year. Yet many teachers remain wary. In this article, the author presents views from teachers regarding the benchmarks.

School districts worried about how students will perform on end-of-the-year state tests are increasingly administering "benchmark assessments" throughout the year to measure students' progress and provide teachers with data about how to adjust instruction. Nearly seven in 10 superintendents surveyed for "Education Week" said…

This article reports how calls are being renewed to tighten the state standards as states feel pressured to revisit them. Two prominent national organizations, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) and the National Research Council (NRC), have declared in the past month that "less is more" in state standards for what students…

This article discusses the increasing number of schools that met all of their 2004 annual achievement targets under U.S. federal law. Over half the states released at least preliminary lists of the number of schools that had made adequate yearly progress under the No Child Left Behind Act, based on 2003-04 test data. In general, the percentage of…

During workshops held in March and April of 2005, Michigan educators got a lesson in how to benchmark their work against promising practices in higher-performing schools with similar socioeconomic profiles. Teams of teachers, educational supervisors, and principals from 13 elementary and middle schools that had been struggling to make adequate…

States should toughen their high school graduation requirements and test to reflect the English and math skills that students actually need to succeeds in college. To identify what those skills are, the American Diploma Project analyzed employment data and conducted research with more than 300 higher education official, front-line manager, and…