Educators are using growth models for a variety of accountability, instructional planning, and evaluation purposes in U.S. schools. This white paper, with a focus on special education populations, provides state and local education personnel with an overview of issues to consider with growth models, a look at models currently in use, and a…

Since the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in 2015, state teams have been preparing their state plans aligned with ESSA for submission in April or September 2017 to the U.S. Department of Education. Because ESSA lands much of the decision-making and responsibility in education at the state and local levels, state education leaders…

The well known 1983 report "A Nation at Risk" recommended that individuals preparing to teach should meet high education standards and demonstrate an aptitude for teaching and competence in an academic discipline--adding also that college and university teacher preparation programs should be judged by how well their graduates meet these…

States are in various stages of reforming how they evaluate their educators, all striving for a new system that can assess a range of abilities and practices over long periods of time and capture the full nature of an educator's performance. The strongest systems look at teaching in a more comprehensive way than evaluations have done in the past,…