This guide was created as a resource to help families better understand "Measures of Academic Progress"® (MAP®), and their child's results. The guide provides answers to a variety of questions such as: "What is MAP?"; "What does MAP measure?"; "How do schools and teachers use MAP scores?"; "Can MAP tell…

Despite evidence that many schools and districts have considerable discretion when hiring teachers and the existence of an extensive literature on teacher quality, little is known about how best to hire teachers. This is, in part, because predicting teacher quality using readily-observable teacher characteristics has proven difficult and there is…

This study examined the impact on student academic performance of referrals for disciplinary intervention in West Virginia. The study also examined differences in these impacts among various student subgroups. Using discipline referral data entered into the West Virginia Education Information System for the 2012-2013 school year and employing…

This paper considers the determinants of student participation in Michigan's large inter-district open enrollment system, known as Schools of Choice (SoC). Employing a rich dataset from the Michigan Department of Education, we examine the population of public school students in resident and non-resident school districts between the 2005-06 and…

Background: In an ongoing effort to improve teacher quality, most states require continuing education or professional development for their in-service teachers. Studies evaluating the effectiveness of various professional development programs have assumed a normal distribution of quality of teachers participating in the programs. Because…

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 requires public schools in the United States to test students in grades 3-8. The author argues that this mandate has been supported by the public, in part, because of the "availability heuristic," a phenomenon which occurs when people assess the probability of an event by the ease with which instances…

To examine how neighborhood characteristics influence academic achievement, data were drawn from a community survey of low-income neighborhoods and linked with data on performance on standardized testing for third-grade students attending elementary schools in those communities. Results of multilevel logistic regressions indicated that probability…