Academic Centers typically display less advocacy on positions and a greater attempt at scholarly analysis.

www.bestevidence.org  Coming out of the Center for Research and Reform in Education at Johns Hopkins, this site reports on what works in education.  Its focus is on classrooms and it sorts various programs, curricula, and school reform models.  It is similar to the Federal What Works Clearinghouse, but it has a wider coverage than the Clearinghouse.

http://epaa.asu.edu   Educational Policy Analysis Archives.  An online research journal from the University of Arizona.   A sample article by Newton, Darling-Hammond, Haertel and Thomas, “Value-Added Modeling of Teacher Effectiveness: An Exploration of Stability across Models and Contexts,” is here: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/810ojs/article/view/810    Findings:  ….”judgments of teacher effectiveness for a given teacher can vary substantially across statistical models, classes taught, and years. Furthermore, student characteristics can impact teacher rankings, sometimes dramatically, even when such characteristics have been previously controlled statistically in the value-added model. A teacher who teaches less advantaged students in a given course or year typically receives lower effectiveness ratings than the same teacher teaching more advantaged students in a different course or year. Models that fail to take student demographics into account further disadvantage teachers serving large numbers of low-income, limited English proficient, or lower-tracked students.”