Assessment is everything. It is formative and summative and diagnostic and benchmarking—it is anything that can inform educators as to the understanding and progress of their students. And it is the critical component by which administrators and faculty alike collaborate on and communicate continual improvement.

For better or worse, the twin legacies of No Child Left Behind and assessment and accountability, will be permanent fixtures of American education policy for decades to come. Theory and practice help make them meaningful. We know that the best assessment programming is comprehensive, holistic, and participant-centered. Strong assessment programming is balanced, with a range and variety of techniques and measures used to accurately assess the diverse learners within a school or district. It is systematic, empowering the local education agency as the locus of accountability and driver of developing plans for collection and use of information. It is learning-centered and collaboratory, enabling district personnel to combine and compare data across classrooms and work together to develop appropriate instructional responses. Above all things, strong assessment programming is meaningful for all stakeholders, including the very students who complete the assessments.

Because assessment is ongoing and all-encompassing, the proactive district must continually ask, “What can we do better?” ECRA can help. We can design a variety of diagnostic, interim, and exit assessments—including performance, writing, and norm- or criterion-referenced multiple choice assessments—aligned to relevant learning standards and/or performance targets.

We can provide a full gamut of scoring and reporting services, from essay scoring to statistical analysis of achievement data. Our value-added growth model can assess individual student growth and determine the effect your district’s personnel and programming had on student progress. We can help build capacity for balanced assessment programming and evaluate the effectiveness of these practices through teacher feedback and cost-benefit analyses.