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.
Juan D’Brot and the Center are pleased to host this post prepared by Juan with contributions from his colleagues on the Joint Committee on Standards for Educational Evaluation: Brad Watts, Julie Morrison, and Jennifer Merriman. The JCSEE's mission is to develop and promote standards for conducting high-quality evaluations through the use of the Program Evaluation Standards.
Jal Mehta, author of In Search of Deeper Learning, was recently interviewed by Rick Hess about how to support deeper learning during the COVID-19 shutdown and remote learning.
As seen by our growing list of recent CenterLine posts, professionals at the Center for Assessment are actively thinking about how to approach the loss of large-scale assessment and accountability data for this school year and its impact on monitoring student performance:
In late winter-early spring 2020, COVID-19 school disruptions became mainstream across the U.S. States and communities implemented policies for “social distancing,” resulting in students schooling from home, which interrupted state assessment schedules in every state.
Canceling state assessments and local schooling have implications for several other state policies and programs, ranging from federal school accountability designations to determining how students could earn credits and graduate.
The COVID-19 (novel coronavirus) global pandemic is having far-reaching effects in all facets of our lives. The impact on student education has been discussed in general terms in the media relative to school closures, and we at the Center for Assessment have been adding to the conversation by giving our thoughts on how changes to statewide assessment administrations may impact state efforts toward measuring student growth for the current and subsequent academic years.
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.
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.
Held each fall since 1999, the Reidy Interactive Lecture Series (RILS) provides a unique opportunity for a diverse group of participants to step back and discuss timely and important topics in assessment and accountability. For RILS 2021 we will gather to consider how states can employ lessons from design thinking as they attempt to create innovative assessment system design.
We welcomed the Spring 2021 conference season with Center participation in national and regional conferences that occurred virtually in April.
As it appears the country is finally turning the corner on the pandemic, we are excited at the prospect of doffing our masks, rolling up our sleeves, and focusing on the future of educational assessment and accountability through our 2021 summer internship program.
