U.S. Department of Education

The United States Department of Education's mission is to promote student achievement and preparation for global competitiveness by fostering educational excellence and ensuring equal access. The department’s stated goal is to promote improvements in the quality and usefulness of education through federally supported research, evaluation, and sharing of information. This grant will support an international convening of educators to discuss the future of the teaching profession and build knowledge from international educators. (Substrategy: Educator Capacity)

The U.S. Department of Education, working with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Domestic Policy Council, proposes to convene a symposium called Innovation and Productivity in Postsecondary Education. The symposium will bring together 150 developers of innovative educational resources, institutional leaders and practitioners in higher education, funders and venture capitalists, and policy experts, to create national momentum around transforming teaching and learning in ways that advance quality and productivity while increasing college completion. The ultimate goal is to launch "disruptive innovation" in teaching and learning on a broader scale to advance quality and productivity and increase college completion.

We propose this grant to the U.S. Department of Education to support their efforts in administering the Race To The Top (RTT) assessment agreements. They will need to seek the advice of assessment experts to support and inform the Department in reviewing and analyzing the work of the two consortia of states that were awarded grants under the RTT competition. The grants were awarded to develop new, common assessment systems aligned to the higher standards that were recently developed by governors and chief state school officers and that have been adopted by 39 states. The tests will assess students' knowledge of mathematics and English language arts from third grade through high school and provide ongoing feedback to teachers during the course of the school year, measure annual student growth, and support Deeper Learning while moving beyond narrowly-focused bubble tests.