The College and Career Readiness Standards, referred to as the Common Core Learning Standards (CCLS) in New York City, are increasingly the focus of educational reform efforts across the United States. Each year for the past several years, the New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) has created a set of focusing expectations for schools in…

This interactive electronic report provides an overview of an innovative new instrument developed by researchers at the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) to authentically measure teachers' formative assessment practices in mathematics. The Teacher Analysis of Student Knowledge, or TASK, instrument assesses mathematics…

District policy makers never have more potential influence than when they are crafting a Policy. In this paper Jonathan Supovitz argues, that the success of an instructional policy depends to some extent on the choices made in its crafting before it is let loose upon the world. The way a policy is framed and designed has important implications for…

This report summarizes findings from one component of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education's (CPRE) evaluation of the General Electric Foundation's (GEF) "Developing Futures"™ in Education program in Jefferson County Public Schools (JCPS). As described in the CPRE proposal and research design, the purpose was to…

Prior to the mandatory testing and reporting required by the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), school improvement efforts were shown to lack coherence (Newman, Smith, Allensworth, & Bryk, 2001) and often included conflicting programs (Hatch, 2002). Part of the theory of performance-based accountability in general, and NCLB in particular, was…

The concept of learning progressions offers one promising approach to developing the knowledge needed to define the "track" that students may be on, or should be on Learning progressions can inform teachers about what to expect from their students. They provide an empirical basis for choices about when to teach what to whom Learning progressions…

The purpose of this exploratory study was to examine the use of interim assessments and the policy supports that promote their use to change instruction, focusing on elementary school mathematics. The authors use the term "interim assessments" to refer to assessments that: a) evaluate student knowledge and skills, typically within a limited time…

This issue of CPRE Policy Briefs summarizes the findings on issues related to teacher quality in the chapter authored by Thomas B. Corcoran in the book, "The State of Education Policy Research." The report also draws on discussions that took place during a 2006 policy briefing on teacher labor-market issues held in Chicago and sponsored by the…

This policy brief describes how the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) has approached the objectives of educational equity and adequacy over the past decade and a half, and reveals how their current finance research has begun to explicitly link the level and use of resources with strategies that districts and schools can deploy to…

This report focuses squarely on strategies for instructional improvement in American high schools. Specifically, this study examines how high schools that perform below average incorporate their state's accountability goals into their own goals, identify their challenges, and search for strategies for instructional improvement. It focuses on how…

This brief summarizes the findings of a recent book, "Standards Deviation: How Schools Misunderstand Education Policy" (Spillane, 2004), that examines state and local government relations as the standards move from the statehouse to the district policymakers and teachers who attempt to make sense of them. It takes a case study approach, focusing…

The Merck Institute for Science Education (MISE) was founded in 1993 to demonstrate that virtually all students could reach high levels of scientific literacy. MISE formed partnerships with four public school districts where Merck has major facilities and a history of providing employee volunteers and supporting local science education…