The Benjamin Banneker Charter Public School in Cambridge--winner of the 2019 Pozen Prize for Innovative Schools--was founded in 1996 by a group of Cambridge-area Black parents and concerned community leaders who acted on the reality that their children did not have access to a rigorous, high-quality education in the traditional neighborhood public…

We used self-report surveys to gather information on a broad set of non-cognitive skills from 1,368 eighth graders. At the student level, scales measuring conscientiousness, self-control, grit, and growth mindset are positively correlated with attendance, behavior, and test-score gains between fourth grade and eighth grade. Conscientiousness,…

Four organizations with promising practices in teacher Professional Growth & Support have significantly raised outcomes for low-income students. The charter management networks, Achievement First and Aspire Public Schools, and the two reform organizations, Teach Plus and Agile Mind, have successfully increased student achievement with a…

This paper profiles the student subgroup achievement and gap trends in Massachusetts for 2010. In grade 8 (the only grade in which subgroup trends were analyzed by achievement level), Massachusetts showed across-the-board gains--improvements in both reading and math at the basic, proficient and advanced levels for all racial/ethnic subgroups, low…

This article reports that special interest groups opposed to charter schools and high-stakes testing have hijacked Massachusetts's once-independent board of education and stand poised to water down the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) tests and the accountability system they support. President Barack Obama and Massachusetts…

Issues related to student, teacher, and school accountability have been at the forefront of current educational policy initiatives. Recently, the state of Massachusetts has become a focal point in debate regarding the efficacy of highstakes accountability models based on an ostensibly large gain at 10th grade. This paper uses an IRT method for…

Teachers may be the most important element of an effective school, but does that mean that K-12 improvement must wait on the ability of schools or systems to recruit, nurture, and retain outstanding teachers? Such a strategy implies that widespread excellence hinges on the ability of publicly funded school systems to attract more than 3.3 million…

This year the Center on Education Policy analyzed data on the achievement of different groups of students in two distinct ways. First, it looked at grade 4 test results to determine whether the performance of various groups improved at three achievement levels--basic and above, proficient and above, and advanced. Second, it looked at gaps between…