Beyond Test Scores : A Better Way to Measure School Quality / Jack Schneider.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Schneider, Jack, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Education--Aims and objectives--United States.

Education.

Educational accountability--United States.

Educational accountability.

Educational tests and measurements--United States.

Educational tests and measurements.

Education and state--United States.

Education and state.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (326 pages)

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, [2018]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

What makes a school a "good" school? It's hard to say, and our current methods of measuring school quality are crude and often misleading. Parents who face the problem of where to matriculate their children are often left to surf websites that only offer one or two metrics by which to measure school accomplishment. Or they ask around among neighbors, work colleagues, and so on; the problem, of course, is that nearly everyone thinks the school their children attend is a "good" school. Lawmakers and education reformers review spreadsheets containing data that only confirm what we already know: high average test scores, the metric most often used to indicate school quality, are merely a reflection of the socioeconomic status of students who attend the school. But which schools improve scores the most? Which are best at protecting kids from bullying and harassment? Which schools are best at science, at the arts? Which schools are best at preparing underserved groups for college and the job market? None of the metrics for school quality that are currently widely available are helpful at answering these questions. Schneider led a team of researchers who asked people what they thought made for a good school. The answers they provided sometimes aligned with the measures policymakers and researchers have deemed important--and sometimes not. Then they set out to design a new system for measuring school quality that would allow Americans to figure out which schools were good at doing what and how to hold schools accountable for improving outcomes.-- Provided by publisher

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Introduction

1. Wrong Answer: Standardized Tests and Their Limitations

2. Through a Glass Darkly: How Parents and Policymakers Gauge School Quality

3. What Really Matters: A New Framework for School Quality

4. But How Do We Get That Kind of Information? Making Use of New Tools

5. An Information Superhighway: Making Data Usable

6. A New Accountability: Making Data Matter

Conclusion

Postscript

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 29. Aug 2018)

ISBN:

9780674981164

0674981162

9780674981157

0674981154

OCLC:

1054878759