This playbook provides ways in which State educational agencies (SEAs) and teams can blur the lines between high school, postsecondary education, and the workforce. SEAs play a significant role to Raise the Bar for student success by developing an "education-to-workforce" system focusing on Unlocking Career Success.

This report summarizes the deliberations and recommendations of the California Advisory Task Force on Alternative Schools (Task Force). The Task Force is a public service project of the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and their Communities at Stanford University and is convened in collaboration with the California Department of Education (CDE). A…

The purpose of this study was to describe how states in the REL Central Region (Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming) evaluate teacher preparation programs and planned changes for evaluation. Publicly available documents were reviewed and interviews were conducted with state education agency representatives…

This fall, the nine states that finished as runners up in last year's groundbreaking Race to the Top competition will have an opportunity to reapply for a grant. The winners will receive a combined $200 million to help implement the bold education reform plans they developed last year. Many of the eligible states already have clear roadmaps toward…

The impact of education decentralization on high-quality education has been mixed at best. This can be attributed to a variety of factors including decentralization itself, ineffectual implementation, political-economic friction, and poor design. This paper focuses largely on the issue of design, contending that if governments or donors aim to…

Since the break up of the USSR, its former republics have seen the emergence and rapid expansion of an examinations industry that was, to all intents and purposes, unknown in Soviet times. New national assessment agencies have been established and been charged with, amongst other things, developing high-stakes exams to replace the diverse and…

For years California has been a leader in public education. In 1999, the state implemented some of the strongest content standards in the country through its main accountability metric, the Academic Performance Index (API). The state has also signed onto the Common Core State Standards, taking important steps to ensure its students are college-…

During the last two decades, many higher education systems in the world have attempted to evaluate and improve the quality of education, research and services at the university and higher education level. Countries which have been successful in these attempts have initiated continuous evaluation and applied internal evaluation as a basis for…

America can no longer afford an education system that fails to use data effectively to guide decisionmaking. The education sector is facing ever-increasing demands to improve student outcomes, reduce burden, increase efficiency, and improve transparency. These demands cannot be met without the strategic and effective use of data. Due to the…

Central Arizona College (CAC) has leveraged EMSI to design the most effective regional strategies for academic/economic prediction analysis. Accessing current and reliable data on occupations, skills requirements, and demographics, CAC can extract, analyze, and present this data to academic programs, advisory boards, economic development councils,…

Data-based decision making has been the mantra of the school reform movement since the late 1980s, but California does not yet have an effective system for collecting and using vital school information. California has taken a number of steps to address this shortcoming. These include the Public School Accountability Act of 1999 and Senate bills…

This study was designed to illuminate the state of education in Taiwan by constructing Educational Indicator Systems. The study, sponsored by the National Science Council between 1998 and 2000, was the first comprehensive indicator project to cover all educational levels in Taiwan. Various research methods were used, including panel discussion,…

Discusses shaping educational accountability systems in the context of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. Suggests ways in which evaluation can contribute to improving and changing accountability systems, especially through the development of standards. (SLD)

The age of accountability in higher education is here, but there has been virtually no development in educational systems that has encompassed the task of producing a performance-based college campus. In order to accomplish the necessary goal of developing subsystems which together constitute a performance-based system, it is necessary that…

This paper is meant to help designers of educational accountability systems think more critically about the questions they want to ask schools and the kinds of analyses that best answer these questions. There are two essential questions in school evaluation: how good is this school, and is it getting better? Each of these questions then can be…