This report from the Career and Technical Education (CTE) Research Network Lead team provides final results from an evaluability assessment of CTE programs that feasibly could be evaluated using a rigorous experimental design. Evaluability assessments (also called feasibility studies) are used in education and other fields, such as international…

Teacher residency programs have emerged as an alternative teacher preparation program that prepares teacher candidates; also known as residents, for high-need areas such as special education in the United States of America. The purpose of this study was to conduct a systematic review of the literature on teacher residency programs in the United…

The ultimate goal of gifted education programs is to cultivate students' competences through challenging, enriching, and engaging opportunities for talent development. The purpose of this review is to present two main approaches of enrichment programs for gifted learners in Taiwan: the programs following the law and the alternative programs…

This guide was developed to provide guidance to states or districts wishing to monitor implementation of educator evaluation systems. It describes a three-step process: develop state guidelines for educator evaluation systems; develop data collection methods; and determine adherence criteria and review data against criteria. The process was…

Policy makers and educators across the nation are incorporating new standards and assessments into evaluation systems, designed to impact teacher effectiveness and student achievement. New York is one of the states that have developed a teacher evaluation system, now fully implemented in all of its 697 public school districts. As the results from…

One major problem in developing school district budgets immune to cuts is the model administrators traditionally use--an expenditure model. The simplicity of this model is seductive: What were the revenues and expenditures last year? What are the expected revenues and expenditures this year? A few adjustments here and there and one has a budget.…

In this report the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution presents the results of a self-developed Education Choice and Competition Index (ECCI) along with an interactive application that grades large school districts according to the ECCI. The index is composed of 13 pro choice criteria. The authors present the ECCI as a…

Educational needs assessments (hereafter NAs) are inattentive to cost considerations and are frequently dominated by elite stakeholder groups. In this article I make a case for adopting a cost-utility approach, illustrating the argument with data generated in a NA of central library services in a Canadian school district. Using survey data from…

District Awards for Teacher Excellence (D.A.T.E.) is a state-funded program in Texas that provides grants to districts for the implementation of locally-designed performance pay plans. All districts in the state are eligible to receive grants, but participation is voluntary. As D.A.T.E. continues in its second year of operation with approximately…

This paper discusses some ways a psychologist carrying out evaluation within a school system can design evaluation studies to maximize the usefulness of the results. A format and procedure for designs based on providing information for decision making are presented. Examples of the experiences of one internal office are discussed. (Author)

In focusing on why and how standards might be incorporated into the evaluation process, two themes are explored: the extent to which the Evaluation Research Society (ERS) Standards differ from other recent standards-setting activities and their applicability to local and state-level evaluation efforts. (Author/LC)

Ten questions to help school districts assess how well or how poorly their teaching/learning goals are being attained. (Author)

Attempts to provide school practitioners with a short list of very general characteristics, most of a non-technical nature, which should exist in any good evaluation study and to show how they might be applied by school personnel to judge an evaluation study being planned or conducted in their system. (Author/RK)

This study provides information about the actual functions and activities of school district evaluation units by examining an integral product of the units. This product, an evaluation report, was examined from a nationwide sample of district evaluation organizations (N=116). Reports were checked for the presence of particular evaluation report…