Offers guidelines, culled from interviews with school board members and administrators, for school-board oversight of charter schools. (LMI)

Today's teachers are unprepared to meet increasingly complex assessment challenges. The poor state of assessment literacy arises from naive assumptions about standardized testing and student motivation, fear of being held accountable for student achievement, parents' nostalgic views of testing, and confusion over achievement expectations for high…

Comprising complex technologies from different academic areas, Tennessee's Value-Added Assessment System measures effects of the system, school, and teacher on rate of student progress. Research findings reveal neutral racial-composition effects for intermediate grades, deleterious effects for students changing buildings, lower yearly academic…

A survey of the broad policy community rates the governor, Democratic and Republican lawmakers, mayor, Chicago Board of Education, district central office, and the Chicago Teachers union in their work of Chicago school governance before and after the July 1995 restructuring. Preliminary results suggest improvement in school governance following…

Uses data from four cities (Chicago, Fort Worth, New York, and Rochester) to explore schools' budgetary and personnel discretion under school-based budgeting; how resource-allocation decisions are made; and factors influencing expenditure decisions. A school-based-budgeting process may increase stakeholder involvement and satisfaction without…

Explains the application of five principles of stewardship to the education of gifted children: (1) teachers/parents teach correct principles; (2) students set their own goals in harmony with these principles; (3) teachers serve students as a source of help; (4) students ask for and receive help when needed; and (5) students give an accounting of…

Presents an institutional framework for raising higher education productivity through administrative and organizational devices: first, by examining two theories for explaining rising higher education costs and their different policy consequences, and then by presenting an administrative process for improving productivity that focuses on…

Reports findings from a preliminary study evaluating effects of the UK's Office for Standards in Education inspections on classroom change, based on teachers' perceptions, responses, and intentions to change practice (resulting from the inspection process) at five comprehensive secondary schools. School context and culture figure prominently.…

This article describes using collegial conversations to consider assistive technology (AT) and evaluate its impact. A self-study process is used to engage educators in a series of conversations about AT outcomes. Four topics structure the conversations: AT and human performance, AT considerations, AT service delivery systems, and accountability…

Introduces a collection of articles on accountability, testing, and academics in schools with minority group and low-income students. The articles share the common viewpoint that there have been, and will continue to be mixed effects of accountability on educational equity in schools and districts. (SM)

Presents an urban practitioner's reaction to arguments about the positive effects of accountability policy on improving educational equity for minority and low income students. Recounts the Houston Independent School District's experiences with accountability and suggests that high levels of learning for all students has become the new civil…

Examines effects of the National Urban League's Systemic Initiative reforms in four cities: Chicago, El Paso, Memphis, and Miami, based on an analysis of interviews with 47 principals. Principals must balance the demands of systemic math and science reforms with those of multilevel accountability policies. Such alignments may be unachievable.…

An AASA report says 80 percent of the nation's superintendents are evaluated annually and 12 percent more often than that. However, comprehensive assessments are rare. Most are done in closed session and are rather perfunctory. Reluctant to use student outcomes, boards are trying more detailed approaches. (MLH)

A study investigated the kinds of instructional and assessment accommodations received by 280 students with disabilities and the extent to which instructional accommodations match assessment accommodations. Most students who had Individualized Education Programs in specific content areas received instructional accommodations in those areas.…

Analyzes the findings of J. Greene and data from Florida and suggests that the strong effects (significant improvement on test scores in schools threatened by vouchers) noted by Greene may actually be due in large part to sample selection, regression to the mean, and problems related to the aggregation of test score results. (Author/SLD)