Jennifer Weston-Sementelli

Education policymakers view transparency and accountability as critical to the success of schools. To support these goals, the District of Columbia Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) has developed an online school report card for communicating information about the characteristics and performance of schools. To support OSSE's interest in making report cards more usable, this study assessed the effect of different designs on how easy the report cards are to use and understa...

Although national assessments for evaluating teacher candidates are available, some state education agencies and education preparation programs have developed their own assessments. These locally developed assessments are based on observations of teaching and other artifacts such as lesson plans and student assignments. However, local assessment developers often lack information about the validity and reliability of data collected with their assessments. The Council for the Accreditation of E...

Education decision makers in Colorado, Missouri, and South Dakota share concerns about and need more information on changes in school and district leadership (principals, assistant principals, superintendents, and assistant superintendents), including mobility (when leaders move to a different school or district within the state public school system) and attrition (when leaders stop serving in a leadership position in the state public school system). In collaboration with educators in those s...

This study is designed to provide a better understanding of the dynamic and geographic character of the teacher labor market, including factors related to mobility and attrition, in rural and nonrural settings in four REL Central region states--Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska, and South Dakota. State and district administrators may use findings to identify needs for recruitment and retention, target workforce improvement strategies, inform progress toward state and district teacher-equity goals,...

This report describes teacher and school characteristics related to teacher movement within and out of public school systems in Colorado, Missouri, and South Dakota. Stakeholders in each of these states expressed interest in better understanding teacher mobility and attrition and related factors. The authors used administrative data provided by state education agencies to examine the characteristics related to the likelihood that teachers would move to different schools or leave state public ...