The year was 2013. Opposition to the Common Core—and to the new assessments aligned to these more rigorous standards—was running high. And states were suddenly questioning their prior commitment to using high quality assessments, like PARCC and Smarter Balanced, to...
Read more >
Think back to your days as a high school student. Did you take the SAT or ACT test? Did you take other standardized tests, maybe an end-of-course exam or graduation test? Was it more important to know how well you...
Read more >
The Every Student Succeeds Act gives states the flexibility to decide how to measure student success in high school. This guide—developed with the input of testing and state policy experts across the country and written by a former state assessment...
Read more >
“Formative assessment is the way we ensure that the kids are learning. I can stand up there and spout stuff all day long. If I don’t do anything to figure out who’s getting it and who isn’t before it’s too...
Read more >
The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) gives all states the chance to dramatically change the way they approach and think about public education. “Making the Most of ESSA” is a reference guide designed to help policymakers and other stakeholders leverage...
Read more >
Sailors for centuries have used the North Star to gauge their relative location to their ultimate destination. Its remarkable light and reliability as a celestial marker, even as the earth spins, means that no matter where ships sail, they can...
Read more >
Our formative assessment study, conducted in collaboration with the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, is a two-part series. Formative Assessment in the Classroom, the study itself, looks at how teachers use formative assessment every day in their classrooms to answer...
Read more >
Recognizing the complexity of challenges facing public education, funders regularly collaborate to pool knowledge, align strategies and attract more resources. Over the past five years, Education First has provided strategy-setting, facilitation and management support to several funder collaboratives aiming to...
Read more >
One of the biggest changes ESSA brings to education policy is a requirement that states start including a broader range of measures for student learning and school success in their accountability systems (you can see an approach Education First proposed...
Read more >
I stepped into my classroom at Eastern Senior High School, a public school in Washington D.C., for the first time in August 2000. At the time, D.C. Public Schools (DCPS) was a mess—student achievement was abysmally low, school buildings were...
Read more >