This commissioned paper examines the National Assessment for Educational Progress model for citizenship and suggests an alternative model oriented more directly to educational and political goals. In the current model performances on the citizenship exercises can only be interpreted by the population characteristics of age, sex, parental…

National math assessment data from 3,112 eighth-grade students in 123 schools were used to determine whether location (rural versus nonrural) affects student achievement when related student and school-level factors are taken into account. Findings indicate that rural schools outperformed nonrural schools in math achievement and that the…