This article begins by thinking about the process of accreditation in general and examining whether it is a transactional or value-added activity. The overall systems of U.S accreditation and National Association for Developmental Education (NADE) accreditation are reviewed.

Despite the Great Recession and looming "student loan debt crisis", college education remains the most proven, invaluable lifetime investment and serves as the most reliable path to upward mobility and socioeconomic class reassignment. Mfume suggests that "the value added" of even one year of college can be transformative. As…

Low-socioeconomic status (SES), minority, and male students perform worse than their high-SES, non-minority, and female peers on standardized tests. This paper investigates how within-school differences in school quality contribute to these educational achievement gaps. Using individual-level data on the universe of public-school students in…

As teacher quality is judged and tenured teachers are rated ineffective, educators are challenging teacher evaluation systems in the courts as they adversely affect their employment. Teachers have lost jobs, pay, tenure, and career advancement. This article reports on these cases, providing an interpretation in light of court cases about teacher…

Academic reviews take on new directions in an ever-increasing fast-paced development. Unit reviewers should be provided different samples, with varied cultural contents also providing nuances, as related to the 'object' of the evaluation, as well as a final overall product, i.e. more of a synthesis, through which one will check the degree of…

Mattering involves feeling as though oneself belongs in a community and tends to influence one's college experience. The issue of mattering has been explored in social psychology and education literature. Such research has sought to understand the transitions and necessary role changes of college students. Unfortunately, there has been a lack of…

The physical education teacher education (PETE) faculty charged with oversight and delivery of initial teacher licensure programs confront several challenges. Some necessitate responses to revised and new standards, while others can be reframed as timely opportunities for improvement and innovation, whether in response to or in anticipation of…

Previous reports suggest that administrators rarely dismiss low-performing teachers despite the changing policy landscape allowing them to do so. This brief uses survey data from Tennessee to investigate the underlying reasons explaining administrators' decisions to retain low-performing teachers. The presented analysis suggests that…

Typically, more primary students qualify for mathematics intervention support than schools have the capacity to assist. This highlights the importance of every primary mathematics teacher having the expertise to design inclusive and responsive curricula and instruction for students who may experience difficulty. Our study addresses this issue…

Short-cycle higher education programs (SCPs), lasting two or three years, capture about a quarter of higher education enrollment in the world and can play a key role enhancing workforce skills. In this paper, we estimate the program-level contribution of SCPs to student academic and labor market outcomes, and study how and why these contributions…

Contemporary teacher evaluation systems use multiple measures of performance to construct ratings of teacher quality. While the properties of constituent measures have been studied, little is known about whether composite ratings themselves are sufficiently reliable to support high-stakes decision making. We address this gap by estimating the…

Recently, interest in test subscore reporting for diagnosis purposes has been growing rapidly. The two simulation studies here examined factors (sample size, number of subscales, correlation between subscales, and three factors affecting subscore reliability: number of items per subscale, item parameter distribution, and data generating model)…

A review of the literature indicates that public school districts, especially those in rural areas, are heavily dependent upon a traditional salary schedule. This may have prevented these districts from leveraging incentives to retain high-performing teachers. This study examines the effects of strategic teacher compensation on teacher quality as…

By aggregating residual gain scores (the differences between each student's current score and a predicted score based on prior performance) for a school or a teacher, value-added models (VAMs) can be used to generate estimates of school or teacher effects. It is known that random errors in the prior scores will introduce bias into predictions of…

Contemporary teacher evaluation systems are built upon multiple measures including, primarily, teacher-level value-added and observational estimates. While researchers have conducted examinations of these systems and indicators, researchers have not investigated how using these systems might distort the validity of the inferences being drawn,…