Purpose: The unanticipated changes in state legislation in Idaho, Indiana, Michigan, Tennessee, and Wisconsin in 2011-12 significantly restricted or entirely prohibited the collective bargaining rights of teachers. Considering these institutional changes as a natural experiment, we examine the causal impact of weakening teacher unionization on…

Data-based decision-making has been a frequently used policy and practice intervention used in schools to help inform the decision-making processes of educational practitioners, with the aim of improving student outcomes. Interim benchmark assessments are designed by commercial test developers to support educators in this framework. In fact, the…

Can leveraging an innovative approach to gathering information on co-curricular learning and learning outcomes assessment practices lead to impactful change? This question guided the implementation and operationalization of the Spartan Experience Record (SER) at Michigan State University (MSU). The SER both provides undergraduate students with a…

Emerging practices in both K-12 and higher education hold great promise in the establishment of equity frameworks. The use of finely disaggregated data, the effort to track additional student groups, and related work, all help to establish policies and tools to monitor the impact of reform efforts to address inequities. State programs and…

This report presents school-level finance data on expenditures by function from the School-Level Finance Survey (SLFS). The SLFS is an extension of two existing collections being conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) in collaboration with the Census Bureau: the School District Finance Survey (F-33) and the state-level…

The need for valid and reliable ways to assess developmental outcomes of preschool children becomes continually more acute as public investments in preschool education grow, with corresponding pressure for programs to demonstrate their ability to influence child outcomes. The authors conducted studies of one assessment widely used in Head Start…

For any labor market to function properly, clear information is needed to guide decision making; its absence invariably leads to less than optimal decisions and inefficiencies. While the broader labor market is riddled with imperfect information, the teacher labor market is particularly vulnerable--largely for the lack of the most basic…

State and local education agencies across the country face challenges related to understanding and managing their teaching staff to best help students learn. Statewide longitudinal data systems (SLDSs) offer valuable information about teacher labor markets that can be used to analyze supply and demand, inform budget and staffing decisions, and…

Accountability seems forever engrained into the K-12 environment, as has been the expectation of delivering quality education to school aged children and adolescents. Yet, repeated failure of this expectation has focused the public's and policy maker's attention on the limitations of major accountability systems. This paper explores applications…

This chapter details the process the University of Michigan developed to build institutional capacity for learning analytics. A symposium series, faculty task force, fellows program, research grants, and other initiatives are discussed, with lessons learned for future efforts and how other institutions might adapt such efforts to spur cultural…

"Measure, Use, Improve! Data Use in Out-of-School Time" shares the experience and wisdom from a broad cross-section of out-of-school time professionals, ranging from internal evaluators, to funders, to researchers, to policy advocates. Key themes of the volume include building support for learning and evaluation within out-of-school time…

While accountability in higher education has been a topic of debate for decades, in recent years the discussions have shifted to emphasize efficiency and economic measures of success. A prominent example of this accountability movement is the increase in popularity of performance funding policies. One of the most recent states to implement…

Qualitative data offer advantages to evaluators, including rich information about stakeholders' perspectives and experiences. However, qualitative data analysis is labor-intensive and slow, conflicting with evaluators' needs to provide punctual feedback to their clients. In this method note, we contribute to the literature on rapid evaluation and…

Inspired by the 2017 Big Ten Academic Alliance Library Conference's collective collection theme, the authors undertook a study to better understand the consortium's resource-sharing needs for Spanish and Portuguese materials published in Latin America. The authors employed multiple technologies to expedite gathering, reconciling, and analyzing…

State policymakers recognize the economic imperative to ensure that education and training are connected to good jobs. Employers are seeking -- and are often struggling -- to hire appropriately skilled workers. For job seekers, the path to a good job with education beyond a high school diploma is certainly clearer than one without postsecondary…