Christopher Tienken and Julie Borst Large-scale annual standardized testing has been federal public school policy for over 20 years. During that time billions of dollars of taxpayer monies have been spent to design, purchase, administer, and score the various tests …

Findings from AASA’s “The American Superintendent: 2020 Decennial Study” suggest that superintendents are more often the ones leading discussions about educational equity in their school communities. But educational equity also was found to be one of tasks that superintendents engaged in the …

In previous writings I detailed some of the issues associated with using results from state standardized tests and most other commercial standardized testing products to draw conclusions about student learning, teacher effectiveness, and the overall quality of schools. In this …

May 14, 2019 New Jersey Joint Committee on the Public Schools Comments on State Assessments, Equity, and Accountability Submitted by Christopher H. Tienken, EdD Associate Professor of Education Leadership, Management, and Policy Seton Hall University South Orange, NJ Good morning …

Sound the alarm bells! The results from the international PISA test are coming! The public education sky will fall once again in December 2016 with the release of the results from the 2015 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). As …

Much of the school reform marketing revolves around the idea of treating parents and students like consumers: “Students and parents are our clients” is a rallying cry heard throughout the education-reform market. One underlying tenet of treating students and parents …

Complexity Versus Difficulty: Don’t Be Fooled             The vendors and supporters of the Common Core State Standards claim that the Standards require greater emphasis on higher-order thinking than previous state standards in mathematics and English language arts. But what is …

By Christopher Tienken, Ed.D. and Julia Sass Rubin, Ph.D. The first administration of the experimental new PARCC high-stakes standardized tests is only weeks away and parents are increasingly concerned. Hundreds of families have notified their school districts that their children …