Career clusters represent a nationwide effort to help learners obtain the knowledge and skills they need for career success, mobility and advancement by aligning what is taught in the classroom to business and industry expectations. In this article, the authors, education department officials from Nebraska, Virginia, and Alabama, outline the…

Since the first child care Quality Rating System (QRS) was implemented in Oklahoma 11 years ago (in 1998), 16 additional statewide systems have been launched and numerous states are piloting or developing a QRS (Zaslow, Tout, & Martinez-Beck, forthcoming). As QRS stakeholders across the nation look ahead to the next decade, it is important to take…

Response to intervention (RTI) can be both a system for providing early interventions to struggling students and a special education diagnostic tool for evaluating and identifying students with specific learning disabilities. Contributing to the very limited literature on state-level approaches, this report describes how nine states define and…

The Emerge One-to-One Laptop Learning Project (Emerge) was established in 2006 by Alberta Education to investigate the efficacy of wireless computing for learning and teaching. In 2007, the Alberta provincial government awarded 3-year grants to 20 Alberta jurisdictions. Based on the projections in the awardees' applications, the project…

A response to criticism by researchers House, Rivers, and Stufflebeam published in the June Kappan. (Editors)

Article described an attempt to make state assessment into a useful tool for improving educational practice. (Author/RK)

This publication presents the latest findings about the effects of Title I programs in the Cleveland, Ohio, schools. These evaluation reports cover the 1979-80 program period, and present information about the effectiveness of each program in attaining the objectives proposed for each component. The programs include: Child Development Project;…

A guide for understanding the New Mexico statewide evaluation program is presented. It includes the following main sections: (1) educational evaluation: 1969 to Current, (2) Senate Memorial 40, (3) entry phases in objective based evaluation program, (4) schedule of evaluation activities for 1972-73 school year, (5) specific duties for MAP…

This report describes the national Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) performance contracting experiment and three of its local programs. It also briefly outlines one state-level development in performance contracting. In the OEO experiment, 20 school districts were selected to represent diverse geographic settings; the common elements of the…

Described is the program assessment instrument used in Massachusett's public school programs for visually handicapped students. (CL)

Presents the basic considerations and major procedures employed in building a vocational special needs evaluation system in Vermont. (JOW)

Accountability is an issue of high visibility, high priority, and great controversy in the social work profession today. The authors try to show what accountability is about, where the profession falls short, and what might be done. (Authors)

In focusing on why and how standards might be incorporated into the evaluation process, two themes are explored: the extent to which the Evaluation Research Society (ERS) Standards differ from other recent standards-setting activities and their applicability to local and state-level evaluation efforts. (Author/LC)

Evaluation of Washington's Family Independence Program (1988-1993), designed to increase self-sufficiency of welfare recipients, shows that employment was lower and welfare participation higher than under Aid to Families with Dependent Children and there was little increase in education and training participation. The program apparently made…

The State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA) is the principal association representing the technology leadership in all fifty states, the District of Columbia, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. This is SETDA's ninth annual report on select educational technology activities. This year's report includes…