Increasingly, school districts, states, and teachers' unions are advancing evaluation reform through legislation and by negotiating changes to collective bargaining agreements. This has compelled education leaders and policy makers to grapple with difficult issues that have received lip service in the past: How can they help all teachers reach…

Enough has been written about academic assessment to fill a library, but when one thinks about it, the whole enterprise really amounts to a straightforward two-step dance. Collect information about how students are doing, then share that information with the students and their parents. Gather and report--that's pretty much it. Collecting…

America's education system is based on the assumption that barring illness or an extraordinary event, students are in class every weekday. So strong is this assumption that it is not even measured. It is the rare state education department, school district, or principal that can tell one how many students have missed 10% or more of the school year…

Measuring a teacher's effectiveness in quantifiable ways is a logical step in a society driven by the SMART goals (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely objectives) that pervade modern management. The idea of using student performance on standardized tests to judge a teacher's effectiveness picked up steam after the Obama…

"Many educators think of formative assessment as another kind of test. Instead, it is a process to help instructors understand their students' day-to-day learning and develop appropriate interventions to improve that learning," says Nancy Gerzon, Senior Research Associate at WestEd. "We know from research that effective formative…

In this article, the author presents the top-10 list of campus computer-security risks he compiled based on several recent computing surveys and interviews with more than a dozen college-technology leaders. The list, ordered from least to most serious, is by no means scientific, but it gives a sense of where today's battle lines are--and why…

The famed playwright Harold Pinter, having just been introduced as a very good writer, was once asked by a six-year-old boy if he could do a "w." The author suspects that "w" was a difficult letter for this young man, and he judged the writing capability of others accordingly. This student's assumption--that being a "good…

As the U.S. economy begins to show signs of improvement, executives say they need a workforce fully equipped with skills beyond just the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic (the three Rs). Skills such as critical thinking and problem solving, communication, collaboration, and creativity and innovation (the four Cs) will become even more…

An evaluation is designed to judge the worth of a program in regards to whether or not it should be continued, modified, or eliminated. Program evaluations can be performed either by those inside or outside of the organization, and can occur pre-implementation, during implementation, or at the end of a time period. There are many models or methods…

It's not often that the goals of closing the achievement gap, providing professional development opportunities to teachers, and benefiting children by using innovative and effective instructional methods coincide. But at Sutterville Elementary School in Sacramento, CA, they do. This article describes the School-Wide Success (SWS) program, its…

School districts, individual schools, and education policies all contribute to student achievement. But it can be argued that the most important contributing factor is the quality of the teacher in the classroom. Evaluating teacher quality is complicated, yet it has become even more important with the testing and assessment focus of No Child Left…

Today's youth need guidance to deal with their new-found and hard-won freedoms. (CK)

Suggests some self-study methods which middle school educators may use to improve their teaching methods and their curriculum. Condensed from "SAANYS Journal," published by the School Administrators' Association New York State, Winter 1980-81, pp5-8. (SJL)

The paper trail leading to reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, scheduled for 2007, is already clogged and will keep getting more so. One needs to select sets of recommendations carefully to avoid being awash in conflicting or redundant ideas. In this article, the author presents a critique, that calls for a major shift in…

In this article, the author discusses the Dubois school's important discoveries about their instructional program after taking a closer look at the year-by-year academic progress of individual students and their participation in a pilot project of the Pennsylvania education department that provides a value added assessment of student test scores.…