Data from high-quality State assessments can inform instruction and help school leaders drive resources to the schools and students that need them the most. This dear colleague letter from the U.S. Secretary of Education reminds all who report and interpret student outcomes this year that assessment data has always been meant to be used…

Recent educational accountability efforts have married student assessments with reform mandates and sanctions. As a result, students--beginning in early elementary grades--are feeling the pressures of this new era of high-stakes accountability. This article chronicles a story of the consequences of high-stakes testing on a father and his son.…

The National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) has long advocated that any meaningful understanding of "effective" teaching must be rooted in results for kids. Whatever else they accomplish in the classroom, effective teachers improve student achievement. It seems like commonsense. Yet, until recently, it has been an exceptional way of…

The Florida case of "Sweeney v. Turlington" dramatically illustrates the confusion between measurement and evaluation and how measurement-oriented evaluation systems diminish the role of the evaluator. This article discusses the implications of this case, which challenged the validity of the Florida Performance Measurement System, a…

During the 1986-87 school year, the state of Texas implemented the Texas Teacher Appraisal System (TTAS), a comprehensive and generic system for improving instruction. This teacher orientation manual has been developed to increase teachers' knowledge of this new appraisal system. The first section provides an overview of the TTAS, including its…

This five-section guide is intended to lead marketing education personnel through the program evaluation and improvement process in Missouri. The first section is an introduction that provides a rationale for evaluation, discusses the resource, process, and product standards that should be used and suggests ways these standards can be applied. The…

This model evaluation program was developed to help marketing education teachers in Missouri to evaluate their courses and plan improvements. Following an explanation of the rationale and nature of the evaluation, the guide consists of six sections: (1) a marketing education course enrollment summary form and directions for completing the…

A study examined statewide implementation of the Arizona Department of Education's vocational technological education (ADE/VTE) model and the feasibility of using Arizona's performance standards in evaluating processes/outcomes at model sites. Data were collected from a pilot study of 12 sites and survey of 128 Arizona local education authorities…

The Evaluation and Assessment Laboratory at the University of Alabama (Tuscaloosa) has contracted with the Georgia Department of Education (GDOE) to develop a microcomputer-based data management system for use in applying evaluation standards to schools and school systems. The Comprehensive Evaluation System (CES) was implemented statewide and has…

Measuring History complements the cases presented in Wise Social Studies Practices (Yeager & Davis, 2005). Yeager and Davis highlight the rich and ambitious teaching that can occur in the broad context of state-level testing. In this book, the chapter authors and I bring the particular state history tests more to the fore and examine how…