Committee Serial No. 88-16.

"The author does all the right things: stays on task, stays focused, communicates clearly, gives correct and adequate information that practitioners can understand and implement, and presents the content in a scholarly, yet friendly style that promotes collaborative efforts." —Marie Kraska, Professor of Educational Foundations, Leadership, and Technology Auburn University "Clear, concise, understandable information presented in a positive, upbeat, and respectful manner. I couldn′t wait to share this with other team members!" —Debbie Johnson, Principal Lunt School, Falmouth, ME Make informed decisions about programs with this step-by-step evaluation process! School leaders can strengthen curriculum and help students experience greater achievement when they have an efficient process for evaluating the effectiveness of school programs. This reader-friendly resource presents a substantive overview of key concepts of the program evaluation process and offers practical guidelines to help administrators and faculty plan and carry out thoughtful evaluations. Designed for new and experienced site-based administrators, this comprehensive second edition provides a wealth of updated information and tools for implementing evaluations, including: An expanded section on needs assessment, complete with new examples Additional methods to analyze data more productively Strategies for using graphs to communicate program results An in-depth discussion of the principal′s role in the evaluation process A built-in facilitator′s guide and checklist A successful, ongoing evaluation process can promote a collaborative culture among faculty, improve teachers′ sense of accomplishment, and strengthen your school′s ability to meet the expectations of students and parents.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), known as the nation's report card, has chronicled students' academic achievement in America for over a quarter of a century. It has been a valued source of information about students' performance, providing the best available trend data on the academic achievement of elementary, middle, and secondary school students in key subject areas. NAEP's prominence and the important need for stable and accurate measures of academic achievement call for evaluation of the program and an analysis of the extent to which its results are reasonable, valid, and informative to the public. This volume of papers considers the use and application of NAEP. It provides technical background to the recently published book, Grading the Nation's Report Card: Evaluating NAEP and Transforming the Assessment of Educational Progress (NRC, 1999), with papers on four key topics: NAEP's assessment development, content validity, design and use, and more broadly, the design of education indicator systems.

The stories in the collection concern a typical suburban, public high school. Typical is the operative word. Tax money poured in by the local community for extraordinary services provided to all school-age children. Money spent everywhere: acclaimed educators hired, spectacular facilities built, resources like computers and laboratory equipment acquired, extra-curricular activities created, yet the outcome? Academic failure, violence, drugs, gangs, and, drop-out rates approaching fifty percent. There is the result! Why? Where has the money gone? The resources gone? The stories provide a glimpse and a few answers. There are portraits of students, teachers, and, school administrators. In these you can figure the reasons for the failures. Often, the failure is a combination of forces, the kids themselves, instability of parents and extended families, poor teachers and administrators, and, a bureaucracy gone wild. To pinpoint any one cause as a reason for the school's record is difficult at best.