The National Assessment Program -- Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) in Australia is a series of literacy and numeracy tests that are used for purposes of school comparison. This paper argues that a key question for this use lies in whether or not this is a reasonable, or valid, use of the test data. Using Kane's argumentative approach to validity,…

Student resistance across the nation has surged since 2014, as students protest, demonstrate, and sit-in and die-in against racism on their campuses, and around the broader and parallel issues of students feeling unacknowledged, silenced, and oppressed by their colleges and universities. These protests are not merely symbolic demonstrations of…

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) has gone from strength to strength in advancing their mission to ensure that American higher education is the finest in the world. This annual report focuses on how well ACTA has led schools, coast to coast, to strengthen cost-control and accountability, nurture academic excellence, and enhance…

The era of educational accountability and high-stakes testing has often caused schools to react by frequently changing reading curriculum, with the quest of increased student achievement and attainment of rigorous standards. While curriculum changes may appear to be well planned and purposeful toward the goal of school improvement, changes that…

Purpose: The purpose of this Policy Delphi Study was to identify the perceptions of California adult school administrators regarding the impacts of the Adult Education Block Grant (AEBG) on the operation of the adult education system, to rate the impacts as to their importance, and to identify strategies for addressing the impacts on existing…

Since the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in December 2015, state education agencies (SEAs) have invested much time, effort, and resources into designing their accountability systems so that they reflect the state's vision and priorities and are in compliance with federal statute. Over the course of the past year, each state has…

The Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF), signed into law by Governor Jerry Brown on July 1, 2013, represents an historic and path-breaking shift for California, the first comprehensive change in the state's education funding system in 40 years. Each district now receives a base funding allocation and, in keeping with the law's equity focus, added…

Three-quarters of students want more information about where their fees go. They have been promised this information for many years but it has been slow to arrive in accessible forms. Now the Office for Students, which has a statutory duty to ensure students receive value for money, is making it happen. This is in the interests of taxpayers and…

During the past decade, states and districts have made significant investments in developing systems to measure teacher performance. The goals of such systems are to improve practice, inform professional growth, and ultimately improve student learning. In the very best of these systems, educators know the expected teaching standards and receive…

We spend a lot of time arguing about how schools might be improved. But we rarely take a step back to ask what we as a society should be looking for from education--what exactly should those who make decisions be trying to achieve? In "Educational Goods," two philosophers and two social scientists address this very question. They begin…

The changes in the economy and society in this century have placed a greater emphasis on the skills that citizens need to be successful. This diverse set of skills, often referred to as 21st century skills, and including critical thinking, creativity, problem solving, communication, and socio-emotional skills, among others, are in high demand as…

This study explored school district adoption and implementation of a learning management system. A substantial body of literature exists on school district data systems. However, this literature is highly rational in its view of data system adoption, and contains limited studies on learning management systems. With these liabilities in mind, this…

Student-Based Budgeting (SBB)--also called weighted student funding, fair student funding, student-based allocations, or student-centered funding--is a school funding system where schools receive dollars based on the number of enrolled students and their individual needs (such as English language learners, or students from high-poverty…

Schools in England and Wales since the late 1980s have been compared in terms of their performances in public examinations and standardised test scores in the form of "school league tables", with Wales ceasing to produce these after 2001. One of the factors related to performance in examinations is the choice of the examination board,…

Accountability in education is not new. Schools have always been accountable in one way or another to the communities they serve, regardless of the policy environment of the time (Elmore, "The Educational Forum," 69:134-142, 2005). This article explores how three principals from Ontario, Canada manage the tensions of multiple…