School grades provide an easily understandable metric to measure the performance of a school. Parents and the general public can use the informational baseline school grade and its associated components to understand how well each school is serving its students. The school grades calculation was revised substantially for the 2014-15 school year to…

In this article, I propose an index, called the Social Index of Educational Effectiveness (SIEE), which allows the establishment of an objective criterion to define the school's profile concerning the promotion of educational equity. It makes it possible to differentiate schools with an "inclusionary profile," (SIEE>0), from those…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to provide an empirical comparison of two measures of school success -- a value-added assessment system and the federally-mandated system of adequate yearly progress (AYP) -- to identify highly effective urban schools in the USA and to explore the predictive relationship between evidence-based decision-making…

As the largest international study ever taken in history, the Trend in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) has been held as a benchmark to measure U.S. student performance in the global context. In-depth analyses of the TIMSS project are conducted in this study to examine key issues of the comparative investigation: (1) item flaws in mathematics…

The purpose of this study was to examine the alignment of the easyCBM[R] mathematics benchmark and progress monitoring measures to the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics "Curriculum Focal Points" (NCTM, 2006). Based on Webb's alignment model (1997, 2002), we collected expert judgments on individual math items across a sampling of forms…

In 1987 the Toronto (Ontario, Canada) Board of Education launched the development of the Toronto Board Benchmark Program to establish benchmarks, which are samples of student performance on a wide range of language and mathematics tasks. These samples, in print and video, show what students in grades 3, 6, and 8 can do on learning tasks based on…

This is a record of the proceedings of the 30th annual conference of the Mathematics Education Research Group of Australasia (MERGA). The theme of the conference is "Mathematics: Essential research, essential practice." The theme draws attention to the importance of developing and maintaining links between research and practice and…