Why Do School Districts Protect the Test Pile?
Many districts conduct reviews to streamline their lineups of required assessments, but they resist eliminating tests. What’s behind that resistance?
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Insights on Educational Assessment, Accountability, and Education Policy
Making Validity Work in Practice
In educational assessment, we spend a lot of time talking about validity, but considerably less time figuring out how to make validation work in practice.
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Tilting at Windmills: Classroom Grading Practices That Won’t Go Away
Bad classroom grading practices persist, even though they’re based on technical quicksand. Here are four ways to improve them.
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How Reading Lists Can Improve Assessments
Required-reading lists can be controversial, but they can help level the playing field for large-scale reading tests by reducing the transfer demand on students.
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Human-Guided Generative AI Across the Survey Lifecycle
In education, surveys are a crucial tool. Where can AI help in survey design, implementation, and reporting, and where is human expertise still essential?
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How Diploma Seals Can Help Assess Civic Learning
Civic seals can do more than recognize student learning. They can be part of a system that supports and gauges their civic readiness.
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Clarifying What Makes Assessment Instructionally Useful
The way we talk about an assessment’s instructional usefulness can undermine the clarity we need to use test information well.
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Leading Education Systems With Purpose in an Incoherent Environment
Education leaders are often asked to make coherent decisions in an incoherent environment. But decisions that fit together logically are important.
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Rethinking Career-Readiness Measures
RILS 2026 grapples with measuring students’ career-readiness. It’s especially important now, with AI, shifts in the economy, and persistent skills gaps.
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How Can School Accountability Reflect the Purposes of Education?
To decide what accountability systems should measure, we must articulate the purposes of schooling. Then we can build systems that reflect them.
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Learning About Reading Assessment
A retreat with experts taught me that our large-scale assessments don’t reflect the way children learn to read.
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Making Sense of Achievement Trends
We should pay attention to achievement trends, but recognize that trends rarely have a single, universal explanation.
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What We’re Up To: Center Presentations at NCSA 2026
We’ve got a bunch of interesting presentations lined up for NCSA next week. Here’s a rundown of what we’re doing.
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When an Assessment Changes, Communication Planning Matters
When an assessment changes, it’s important to build understanding early. Constituencies need to know what changed, why, and what it means for them.
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Reclaiming Accountability: From Labels to Learning
Accountability identifies schools that need support, but it must do better to help educators understand the problem and what to do next.
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Evaluating the Impact of Statewide School Accountability Systems
Are school accountability systems working as intended? As the U.S. Education Department offers states flexibility, it’s time to examine the evidence.
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Measuring Durable Competencies: Right-Sizing Expectations
Pressure to measure durable competencies is surging. But it’s challenging: there are limitations to what the data actually tell us.
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Supporting Systemic Changes in High School Math
Making deep changes in high school math assessment requires sustained support. These two new guides for state and district leaders can help.
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