This document presents the proceedings of a symposium which featured 11 Illinois schools that were selected as successful in their school-improvement efforts and focused on the role of colleges of education in facilitating school reform. The schools included two accelerated schools, one magnet school, and several examples of school-based…

The Mid-continent Regional Educational Laboratory's (McREL's) Mid-continent Alliance focuses on technical areas that must be considered by every school system that is serious about reform. This document contains four articles that focus on four important pieces of the school-reform puzzle: (1) standards and benchmarks for learning; (2)…

This document presents findings of a study conducted by the Commission on Educational Excellence for Connecticut, which examined current policies and practices in the state's public education system and recommended changes that would establish and maintain a world-class education system with opportunity available to all students. The Commission…

In today's schools, the pervasiveness of assessment has often distorted teaching and learning through testing, examining, and short-term memorizing. Learning to cope with examinations has become almost as important as the learning itself. This report is the third in a series of publications derived from the Centre for Educational Research and…

Statewide assessments, developed by several states, of student learning in the visual arts, copies of their visual arts assessment tests, technical manuals, supporting documentation, and evaluative approaches other than testing were critically described within this study. Information gathered resulted in grouping the descriptions of state level…

Schools and districts have functioned for too long on the premise that they have a clear understanding of the quality of their graduates. Traditional methods for measuring the effectiveness of education relied too heavily on standardized test scores. The production of annual school and district profiles is an ongoing commitment in the Grande…

To design a school where all children succeed means creating a place that puts learning, rather than competition, at the heart of the process. This book does not propose Total Quality Management (TQM) as the cure for improving performance of U.S. schools, but rather argues that schools as a place and name should be replaced with the term…

Research has shown that, when administered properly, kindergarten readiness screening results are associated closely with future school success. The Dallas Preschool Screening Test (DPST) is one of many such instruments used to determine school readiness and predict school success. A study sought to determine the effectiveness of the DPST in…

A school environment analysis is a comprehensive set of techniques that assess productivity and satisfaction of both students and staff. While the means to school environment assessment are not particularly complicated or time consuming, the analysis must be conducted in a comprehensive and systematic fashion, using a variety of types of data.…

This digest considers the use of performance assessment within outcomes-based accountability systems for students with and without disabilities. Application of performance assessment to students with disabilities involves defining the outcomes, developing performance standards, developing assessment accommodations, and scoring. Implications of…

In 1981, at the end of a long period of economoic growth in the Mexican economy, the national education system had grown considerably to where one out of three citizens was enrolled in school. Student enrollment for 1981-82 was 22.7 million, almost double enrollment for 1970. Close to 90 percent of those students were in primary and secondary…

This paper presents findings of a case study that documented the implementation of a portfolio assessment system in response to mandated program improvement and assessed its impact on teacher and student behaviors. The sample included elementary and middle school teachers and students from three Chapter 1 schools in a rural California school…

President Bush's America 2000 strategy, like the Education Reform Act of 1988 adopted by Prime Minister Thatcher's government in the United Kingdom, seeks to make education accountable to the marketplace. Both programs promote school choice, site-based management, and national control of curriculum and assessment. British studies have shown that…

This annotated bibliography lists the titles, authors, sources, relevant grade levels (where appropriate), and annotations of resources that provide an introduction to various educational assessment topics. Annotations are designed to give readers enough information to decide whether or not it would be useful for them to read the complete…

This document describes a vision for education in the state of Washington and offers a proposal for the state legislature's consideration. An article by the Governor, Booth Gardner, provides an overview of the state's vision for education, discussing the seven assumptions of school improvement, the shift from a focus on inputs to student outcomes,…