The National Center on Education And The Economy published a 2013 report entitled “What Does It Really Men to Be College and Work Ready?”  Subtitled “The Mathematics and Englis Literacy Required for First Year Community College Students,” this is a very different take on the notion of college and career ready usually cited by reformers.  Nothing the surprisingly his percent of students (45%) for whom community colleges are their first step to higher education, their results show that not all students need to be ready to enter an Ivy League school in order to be ready for life after high school.  Read this and you’ll be wondering what much of the college and career readiness fuss is all about.  In my opinion, it’s about the continual effort to discredit public schools rather than a thoughtful analysis of businesses and colleges seek from recent high school grads.

AERA, Summer 2004.  Research Points: Essential Information for Education Policy.  “Teachers Matter: Evidence from Value Added Assessments.”  A four page discussion of VA, with pros and cons.  Nice starting point for understanding such systems.  At:
http://www.aera.net/Publications/ResearchPoints/tabid/10234/Default.aspx  You’ll need to scroll to the Summer 2004 edition of Research Points to find it.

Google has two sites that improve your chances of focusing on research articles.  Google Scholar, at www.scholar.google.com, searches for scholarly works, as the name implies.  Results of your searches are likely to be abstracts of articles from scholarly journals, and unless you have access to a university library research collection with rights to the online articles, you’ll need to pay for access or request the articles from a local library.

http://susanohanian.org   Susan Ohanian writes very outspoken commentary about NCLP  and education policy—she likes very little of it.  She aggregates lots of other anti-NCLB writers as well, usually by educational reformers who oppose current policies.  The site is a pleasure to peruse—if you’re not employed by SED, the USDOE, or Pearson, you’ll enjoy exploring it.  She includes some interesting quotes. “Paper books may be the only media remaining that don’t report your behavior back to anonymous aggregators.”  —W. W. Norton, Twitter, Feb. 5, 2012

William Sanders, 2006.  “Comparisons among various educational assessment value-added models.”  www.sas.com/resources/asset/vaconferencepaper.pdf  From one of the major name in educational applications of value-added modeling, this has a brief review of various assessment models, but becomes somewhat technical as it continues.  This is sponsored research by the company that markets the Sanders EVASS model.  His is the biggest name in educational value-analysis.