We’re committed to helping states and school districts design and implement assessment and accountability systems that support meaningful educational outcomes and student achievement.
We help states and school districts design assessments and assessment systems that meet technical and policy goals to support student learning and for other critical uses.
We’re a leader in designing and implementing accountability systems for states and school districts to meet key federal and state requirements that also support continuous improvement efforts.
State and district leaders are facing multiple concerns in response to widespread and potential long-term school closures due to the growing threat of COVID-19. The concerns are broad and consequential. We launched this page to help you efficiently find the resources you need during these uncertain times.
For those hoping for minimal disruption to ESSA school accountability, I have bad news and more bad news.
The bad news is that school accountability as we know it is entirely offline for 2020. Before the calendar even flipped to April, the U.S. Department of Education granted waivers to all 50 states, D.C., Puerto Rico, and the Bureau of Indian Education.
City Year is an American education nonprofit organization founded in 1988 and dedicated to helping students and schools succeed. The organization partners with public schools in 29 high-need communities across the U.S. and through international affiliates. The Center for Assessment has been partnering with City Year for several months to help increase the assessment knowledge and skills of City Year staff. We’ve had the privilege of working with Will Scarbrough, the head of Student Analytics for City Year, on this project.
This is the final installment in a three-part series on the future of large-scale state assessment and accountability. Of course, it is impossible to know the future, but forecasts for educational assessment can be informed by examining what has shaped state assessment and accountability in the past.
This annual colloquium is named in honor of Brian Gong, the Center’s Co-Founder and former Executive Director. Our aspiration for this internal event is to foster the intellectual curiosity, innovative thinking, and respectful discourse Brian models. Our staff focuses on a topic that may be outside of their expertise but is likely to have a significant impact in our field of work. We spend one year gathering information on the topic, and we invite experts to join us for the colloquium to share information and engage in discussions.
The Brian Gong Colloquium provides an opportunity for Center staff to expand our knowledge and increase our effectiveness in supporting innovations and improvements in assessment and accountability.
Since 1999, this annual conference brings together a diverse audience to engage with a timely topic in applied assessment or accountability. RILS is unique in that it allows for attendees to dive deep into a single topic and collectively share perspectives, challenges, and solutions.
RILS is named for lifelong educator Edward F. Reidy, Jr., who played a significant role in improving public education in Kentucky and across the country, particularly through standards-based reform. Since his passing in 1999, we have been proud to keep his visionary spirit alive through the Reidy Interactive Lecture Series.
The Center for Assessment has designed a multi-phase interim assessment toolkit intended to help districts identify gaps and needs within their assessment systems, develop a theory of action based on those findings, and guide districts through the selection, use, and evaluation of interim assessments.
New Hampshire Superintendent Kadie Wilson explains how her district engaged in design thinking to create an assessment system that would provide high-quality instruction, curricula, and assessment practices.
Hear from members of the Wyoming Department of Education’s Standards and Assessment Team, as well as a district curriculum director, to learn how they overcame specific challenges in the implementation of a new interim assessment, and what the assessment is doing for the state today.
There has long been a challenge associated with how interim assessments are selected, used, and evaluated. Hear from educators from the Wyoming Department of Education as they detail their approach to interim assessments to improve student learning and performance.
The Center’s annual Reidy Interactive Lecture Series conference brings together education professionals from states and school districts across the country. Hear from some of our staff and multi-year attendees about how the conference has helped promote important change in assessment, accountability, and student learning.
In recent weeks, several CenterLine posts have addressed how states, districts, and schools should consider using assessment to support instruction when school begins again in the fall. We are pleased to share this guest post by Kristen Huff of Curriculum Associates with her perspective on this important topic.
Since school closures and remote learning became the norm, I have received emails from school and district leaders relevant to COVID-19 achievement gaps asking some variation of this question:
All states closed their schools in March and suspended or canceled annual state assessments. While the US Department of Education (USED) immediately waived state testing requirements for 2020, some states are contemplating the administration of their summative state assessments next fall; purportedly to help leaders and educators better understand and respond to the impact of school closures on student learning. Although this may seem appealing, these assessments are no better suited to informing instructional decisions than they have been in the past.
