It’s not too late to improve state ESSA plans. Approved state ESSA plans can be amended at any time. That’s both good news and bad news. I fear the premature approval by the U.S. Department of Education (USED) of Florida’s plan to implement the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) could have a negative impact on plans from other states whose policy
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We are proud to announce a new peer-reviewed paper entitled Examining the myth of accountability, high-stakes testing and the achievement gap In this article, we outline how notions of accountability and the achievement gap have relied upon the massive expansion of high-stakes exams in our nation’s schools. Texas-style test and punish accountability manifested in various ways within schools and school culture across
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In my recent School Law and Policy course at California State University Sacramento, I challenged my EDD students to work with me to detail a new input orientation, empirically-based idea for school finance based on Opportunity to Learn (OTL) “state minimums.” I believe that we have come up with a jumping off point for a promising approach to thinking about
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I am currently sitting in the Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE) annual conference being held in Sacramento. A new study just dropped that show money clearly matters in California school finance and that it has had a positive impact on student achievement and graduation rates across the state. View this post on Instagram Spending my morning learning about new
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Since the onset of No Child Left Behind over a decade ago, a lynchpin of accountability formulas for U.S. schools has included some form of a state-mandated exam. Accountability policies have utilized standardized tests as the basis of decisions that determine progression through grade levels, access to higher education, progress in achievement, and resource allocation to schools (Darling-Hammond, 2003). Considering
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Cloaking Inequity 
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