This book examines the idea of educational accountability in higher education, which has become a new secular gospel. But do accountability policies actually make colleges better? What if educational accountability tools don't actually measure what they're supposed to? What if accountability data isn't valid, or worse, what if it's meaningless?…

Nations, states, and districts must choose among an array of different approaches to measuring school effectiveness in implementing their accountability policies, and the choice can be difficult because different approaches yield different results. This study compares two approaches to computing school effectiveness: a "beating the odds"…

Developmental science demonstrates that younger children (ages 4 to 8) are capable of making meaning of their contexts and the self. Yet, younger children's meaning making is largely absent from intervention and implementation research on early childhood policies. This absence is notable given the rise in investment in early childhood policies and…

High-quality measurement tools are critical to school improvement efforts. Education researchers frequently employ surveys in order to assess a host of variables associated with school improvement. This article asserts that Rasch modeling techniques enhance the quality of a measurement tool because they comprise elements of both qualitative and…

Measures of student disadvantage--or risk--are critical components of equity-focused education policies. However, the risk measures used in contemporary policies have significant limitations, and despite continued advances in data infrastructure and analytic capacity, there has been little innovation in these measures for decades. We develop a new…

This chapter describes international policy contexts of adult literacy and language assessment and the shift toward standardization through measurement tools. It considers the implications the quantification of learning outcomes has for pedagogy and practice and for the social inclusion of transnational migrants.

Large-scale academic assessments have played a dominant role in U.S. federal and state education policies over the past couple of decades. Among the many validity issues that presently concern test users is the evaluation of alignment among large-scale assessments and the academic content and performance standards on which they are based. This…

Public school critics often point to rising expenditures and relatively flat test scores to justify their school reform agendas. The claims are flawed because their analyses fail to account for the difference in data types between dollars (ratio) and test scores (interval). A cost-benefit analysis using dollars as a common metric for both costs…

For better or worse, many educational decisions that were once handled on a personal level by teachers or administrators now increasingly rely upon data and information. To be successful in this era, educators need to understand this broad sociotechnical revolution and how it is realigning traditional roles and responsibilities. In this book, the…

Between 2009 and 2014, thirty-seven states in the United States have adopted or significantly amended their teacher evaluation laws, mostly shifting toward using measurements of student growth on achievement tests. Yet, the processes to evaluate core subjects have not always transitioned smoothly to nontested or artistic content, causing some…

The number of years a child of school-entry age can expect to remain in school is of great interest both as a measure of individual human capital and of the performance of an education system. An approximate indicator of this concept is the sum of age-specific enrolment rates. The relatively low data demands of this indicator that are feasible to…

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…

After decades of disinterest, evaluation of the performance of elementary and secondary teachers in the United States has become an important educational policy issue. As U.S. states and districts have tried to upgrade their evaluation processes, one of the models that has been increasingly used is the Framework for Teaching. This paper summarizes…

Are teachers' impacts on students' test scores ("value-added") a good measure of their quality? This question has sparked debate largely because of disagreement about (1) whether value-added (VA) provides unbiased estimates of teachers' impacts on student achievement and (2) whether high-VA teachers improve students' long-term outcomes.…

This essay is a contribution to the literature of critique of higher education policy and management. It offers a general discussion of problems arising from the proliferation of mechanisms of audit and quality assurance within the context of concerns about dependence on quantitative measures of values. It argues that uncritical dependence on…