This article approaches the evolving concept of validity of assessments, moving from the scholarship of the past, to the constraints and demands of the present. The use of technology and globalization are raised as challenges to future approaches to validity.

This article provides an analysis of the recent publication of the value-added measurements found in the Teacher Data Reports of the New York City Department of Education.

This article considers the value of the national move toward value-added measures and our current fascination with objective measurements – a fascination that stems from our collective distrust of our teachers and ourselves, and our reluctance to make judgments about the substantive narratives we teach students.

Assessment use has switched from measurement tools to policy levers. Meaning is created by use, and the intense push for test-based accountability and teacher evaluation policies in the U.S. has fundamentally changed the nature of test use. The core meaning of testing has accordingly been qualitatively changed, and serious policy attention to issues of consequential validity counsels against use of tests to drive policy unless, and until, the results that process itself have been validated for their furtherance of recognized goals.

This research uses oral history narratives to examine the professional choices and trajectories of Teach for America participants over a twenty-year period, attending especially to individuals’ perceptions of their urban teaching experiences, their beliefs, and their reasons for staying in or leaving the urban classroom, with the aim of better understanding the experiences of such teachers and the implications for staffing urban schools.

Examination of the political origins of state performance funding for higher education in six states (Florida, Illinois, Missouri, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Washington) and the lack of its development in another two states (California and Nevada).

Setting the stage for the special issue, this article discusses the increased attention to data use in policy and practice, provides an overview of the major ways that scholars have studied data use, highlights the limitations of the extant research, summarizes the contributions of the articles in this special issue to addressing these limitations, and previews the articles that follow.

This article reviews the literature on the qualities of assessments and identifies three crucial test design elements that can provide insightful feedback to teachers about students’ understanding to inform subsequent instructional choices.

This article synthesizes what we currently know about interventions to support educators’ use of data—ranging from comprehensive, system-level initiatives, such as reforms sponsored by districts or intermediary organizations, to more narrowly focused interventions, such as a workshop. The article summarizes what is known across studies about the design and implementation of these interventions, their effects at the individual and organizational levels, and the conditions shown to affect implementation and outcomes, and concludes by suggesting directions for future research.

Many studies have found that educational accountability policies increase data use, but because accountability has been conceived of as one “treatment,” little is known about the features of accountability systems that are most likely to increase desirable versus undesirable uses of data. I define desirable data use as practices that do not invalidate the inferences about student- and school-level performance that policy makers, educators, and parents hope to make. This article proposes that five features of accountability systems affect how data are used and discusses what we know, and what we don’t know, about their effects. In each of these areas, I propose a research agenda intended to further our understanding of how accountability systems affect data use.

This article offers that many data use studies suggest that the interpretation and use of data take place both within and between individuals who, through social interaction, are both co-constructing and making sense of data and their use. Given the increasing important role of social relationships in data use studies, better theorizing and deeper understanding regarding the dynamics of social influence and processes on the interpretation and use of data are needed. Social network theory and analysis offers a useful conceptual framework and accompanying methods for describing and analyzing the structure of a social system in an effort to understand how social relationships support and constrain the interpretation and use of data in educational improvement.

This article reviews political science theories and findings to inform our understanding of how politics affects efforts to increase data usage in education policy and school reform. Rather than block the door to politics, those who hope to promote informed policy making might consider ways to use politics to protect and defend high-quality data and their informed application

This commentary on the special issue on data use highlights the distinctions between data systems intended to improve the performance of school staff and those intended to hold schools and districts accountable for outcomes. It advises researchers to be alert to the differences in the policy logics connected with each approach.

This commentary draws on the articles in this issue to underscore the importance of community engagement and districtwide capacity building as central to efforts to use data to inform accountability and choice, along with school and instructional improvement. The author cautions against treating data as an all-purpose tool absent adequate attention to developing solutions to the problems data illuminate.

This commentary frames the importance of the topic of this special issue by highlighting the changes that have occurred in school systems around data use, particularly in large urban districts, and the need for a more rigorous evidence base. Collectively, the articles in this volume provide a jumping-off point for such a research agenda around data use in schools. Each of the articles identifies significant gaps in our knowledge base and develops useful conceptual frameworks within which to think about the dimensions of data use, the quality of the research evidence, and the implications for the field.

College grades can influence a student’s graduation prospects, academic motivation, postgraduate job choice, professional and graduate school selection, and access to loans and scholarships. Despite the importance of grades, national trends in grading practices have not been examined in over a decade, and there has been a limited effort to examine the historical evolution of college grading. This article looks at the evolution of grading over time and space at American colleges and universities over the last 70 years. The data provide a means to examine how instructors’ assessments of excellence, mediocrity, and failure have changed in higher education.

This study examines the impact of high-stakes exit testing on English learners (ELs) in Texas. Quantitative and qualitative data suggest that high-stakes exit assessments have led to higher EL dropout and lower graduation rates.

This article describes a randomized field trial conducted to estimate the impact of modest monetary incentives on performance on a version of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) 12th-grade reading assessment. Monetary incentives have a statistically significant and substantively important impact on both student engagement/effort and achievement.

The goal of this article is to broaden the understanding of what it means for schools and teachers to be held accountable for student learning and to discuss how different accountability frameworks affect instructional practices in classrooms. We take a practice-oriented perspective on assessment, examining how assessments in schools that participated in a class size reduction program intersected with forces of accountability. Building on three years of data collection in 27 classrooms in nine schools, data were generated through multiple methods, including ethnographic observations, interviews, administration of the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS), document and artifact collection, and analyses of school-level standardized test scores. We identify and discuss three aspects of assessment practices that affect this intersection: alignment, audience, and action.

This article argues that the historical reduction of age at grade level in the 20th century has interacted with test scores that take age into account, resulting in a rise in IQ scores in school populations.

Framed by the assumptions of ethnomethodology and drawing on methods of conversational analysis, the author analyzed a set of 10 transcripts of Teacher Work Sample scoring conversations to identify patterns in scorer interaction. Interactive rules and strategies are identified and implications and cautions offered for the use of work samples, particularly for high-stakes assessment.

In this article, teacher action research is positioned as a bridge connecting research, practice, and policy—as an important and practical way to engage teachers as consumers of research, as researchers of their own practice, as designers of their own professional development, and as informants to scholars and policy-makers regarding critical issues in the field.

This article analyzes the classroom instruction of an experienced teacher in an elementary school where the principal resisted a movement toward standardization and supported teachers’ autonomy and authority over curriculum and instruction amid high-stakes state-level testing in language arts and mathematics. Examining the teacher’s instructional practice in social studies, a subject not included in state testing but nevertheless impacted by state testing, we demonstrate how specific teaching dilemmas that arose in response to state testing led to a new type of professional practice that we call constrained professionalism.

This project examines the intersection of in-class assessments, student identity, and the construction of teachable moments. Through examining a science department’s attempt to use daily practice with assessments as a teaching tool, this study explored students’ use of discourse in relation to the teacher’s use of this approach to teaching.

This article focuses on the public and Catholic school discourse that accompanied the introduction of IQ testing in the early 20th century. It analyzes the nature of the discourse among educational researchers, administrators, and teachers in two parallel educational settings and examines the way that public and Catholic school educators responded to IQ testing.

This article contrasts democracy with corporatocracy, showing that the accountability movement today is rooted more in the latter than the former. Case studies of two teachers explore how democratically minded teachers can navigate accountability pressures in a corporatocratic context, as well as limitations that context places on them.

This study explores the design process of how one urban school district developed and deployed a series of reports designed to communicate the results of student achievement testing across the district. The focus of this research is to understand the district’s efforts to design new programs that would fit coherently into existing initiatives in local schools.

This article analyzes cultural and home language influences in the responses of White, African American, Hispanic, and Haitian American children on paper-and-pencil science assessments. Factors interfering with students’ interpretation of test items and teachers’ interpretation of students’ responses included (1) phonological and semantic features of students’ home languages, (2) students’ cultural beliefs and practices, and (3) “languacultural” features linked to various discursive and textual conventions. The article concludes that science assessments are inherently cultural objects whose content and organization rely on implicit knowledge that different groups of students may not share.

This article explores the doubting process as an emerging concept in school reform. After introducing the concept of doubt and its importance in educational reform, the article exemplifies a secondary school principal who doubted core pedagogical practices.