In case you missed Sunday's New York Times editorial, it highlighted some key measures in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act for tracking student performance:
We encourage you to read the entire editorial.
The stimulus package, including a $54 billion “stabilization” fund to protect schools against layoffs and budget cuts, is rightly framed to encourage compliance. States will need to create data collection systems that should ideally show how children perform year to year as well as how teachers affect student performance over time. States will also be required to improve academic standards as well as the notoriously weak tests now used to measure achievement — replacing, for instance, the pervasive fill-in-the-bubble tests with advanced assessments that better measure writing and thinking.
We encourage you to read the entire editorial.
