The care and education of the youngest children in the United States has become a critical public policy issue affecting millions of families. This guide closely examines the issues and tradeoffs in key child care policy decisions that face state legislators. The guide provides a discussion of state efforts to build supply, improve quality, and…

Based on data obtained from the state supervisors of foreign languages by the Joint National Committee for Languages, this brief report lists the threats that jeopardize the status of language programs in the United States. These include: budget constraints; the possibility of further minimizing the federal role in education; reversing the…

This document contains the oral and written statements of witnesses who testified at a hearing on the Reemployment and Retraining Act of 1994 and the WARN [Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification] Amendments Act. Witnesses included Senator Howard Metzenbaum of Ohio, several union and public employment program officials from several states,…

A study investigated whether Louisiana school districts and schools involved in the SPUR (Special Plan Upgrading Reading) program were implementing and maintaining essential elements of the project five years after termination of state funding and external support. Subjects were the 66 superintendents or their designee at the district level as…

The purpose of this study was to analyze the effect of including special education students in the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) accountability subset of students. In 1999, the accountability subset was expanded to include scores for all special education students not exempted and all bilingual/limited English proficient (LEP)…

This guide explains results and other information in the "Test Item Analysis Report," the "School Report," and the "District Report" for the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) tests for spring 2000. It is designed to help superintendents, principals, and other administrators as they review the…

This paper examines the responses of four high schools to new accountability policies in two states, New York and Vermont. In each state, one school that was better positioned with respect to the policy and one that was a target of the policy were studied. New York's policy attaches high stakes for students though the Regents high school exit…

Now in its seventh year, the Illinois Youth Summit focuses on issues of violence affecting youth. On December 5, 2000, representatives from 21 high school classrooms across Illinois met to determine youth safety issues of greatest relevance to students across the state. These students identified three sources of violence to address at the 2001…

This brief discusses ways to measure and report school quality. At present, the differences in state accountability systems make comparisons of schools and school systems very difficult. The most common approach to reporting school status is in the context of current status, an approach in which the school mean or median score for students in the…

This document contains the results of a standard setting conducted between August 2 and August 12, 1999, on the Delaware Student Testing Program (DSTP) Mathematics, Reading, and Writing subtests at grades 3, 5, 8, and 10. At the standard setting, judges were asked to recommend only the cut point between "Below the Standard" and…

The federal class-size-reduction initiative and programs such as Wisconsin's Project SAGE (Student Achievement Guarantee in Education) provide funds for a variety of "small-class models," including intact small classes with one teacher, team-taught classes with 30 or more students and 2 full-time teachers, "push-in" or…

This report contains results of Arizona's Instrument To Measure Standards, administered in grade 10 in Spring 1999 and reported in an updated version in this report of March 2000. For each high school, the following information is provided: (1) number of students in the summary; (2) the mean scale score; (3) the median score; and (4) the percent…

This document presents school and district information on the spring 2000 administration of the Arizona Instrument To Measure Standards (AIMS) organized by grade and alphabetically by district and school. Grade level is noted at the top of each page. AIMS scores for each subject are organized in columns under each subject area heading. Information…

In 1998 the Wake County Public School System adopted a goal of having 95% of all students tested at or above grade levels as measured by the North Carolina End-of-Grade (EOG) tests by 2003. This bulletin reports progress toward that goal. Analysis of the EOG test results for 1999-2000 show that scores on all four tests targeted by the 2003 goal…

This issue of WIN (Welfare Information Network) Issue Notes raises some major issues that agencies may want to address as they consider expanding collaborative efforts. It describes collaborative efforts and identifies resources that could prove useful in designing successful collaborations. Section 1 offers background. Section 2 answers these…