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THE STANDARD EPISTEMOLOGY requires the use of hard science to gain knowledge and discover the truth. In contrast, Deaf epistemology relies heavily on personal testimonies, personal experiences, and personal accounts to document knowledge. In recent years, a number of deaf schools have adopted deaf-centric policies shaped by Deaf epistemology in an effort to improve academic performance of deaf students. Because of federal laws, all schools are now expected to show accountability in the performance of their students, with data becoming increasingly available for public scrutiny. The preliminary data from three wellknown deaf schools are beginning to show that the effectiveness of deafcentric approaches can be substantiated by the standard epistemology. For this reason, Deaf epistemology and the standard epistemology should not always be viewed as having an oxymoronic relationship.

There has been a scarcity of studies exploring the influence of students' American Sign Language (ASL) proficiency on their academic achievement in ASL/English bilingual programs. The aim of this study was to determine the effects of ASL proficiency on reading comprehension skills and academic achievement of 85 deaf or hard-of-hearing signing students. Two subgroups, differing in ASL proficiency, were compared on the Northwest Evaluation Association Measures of Academic Progress and the reading comprehension subtest of the Stanford Achievement Test, 10th edition. Findings suggested that students highly proficient in ASL outperformed their less proficient peers in nationally standardized measures of reading comprehension, English language use, and mathematics. Moreover, a regression model consisting of 5 predictors including variables regarding education, hearing devices, and secondary disabilities as well as ASL proficiency and home language showed that ASL proficiency was the single variable significantly predicting results on all outcome measures. This study calls for a paradigm shift in thinking about deaf education by focusing on characteristics shared among successful deaf signing readers, specifically ASL fluency.

In this study, we examined how the relationships between one observation protocol, the Protocol for Language Arts Teaching Observation (PLATO), and value-added measures shift when different tests are used to assess student achievement. Using data from the Measures of Effective Teaching Project, we found that PLATO was more strongly related to the Stanford Achievement Test (SAT-9), the alternative assessment used by MET to assess more ambitious outcomes. We also found that the SAT-9 is more instructionally sensitive to the PLATO factor of Cognitive and Disciplinary Demand than the state tests used in MET study. This difference suggests that PLATO factors designed specifically to identify ambitious instructional practices are especially sensitive to which test is used to construct value-added scores.

The first large-scale, nationwide academic achievement testing program using Stanford Achievement Test (Stanford) for deaf and hard-of-hearing children in the United States started in 1969. Over the past three decades, the Stanford has served as a benchmark in the field of deaf education for assessing student academic achievement. However, the validity and reliability of using the Stanford for this special student population still require extensive scrutiny. Recent shifts in educational policy environment, which require that schools enable all children to achieve proficiency through accountability testing, warrants a close examination of the adequacy and relevance of the current large-scale testing of deaf and hard-of-hearing students. This study has three objectives: (a) it will summarize the historical data over the last three decades to indicate trends in academic achievement for this special population, (b) it will analyze the current federal laws and regulations related to educational testing and special education, thereby identifying gaps between policy and practice in the field, especially identifying the limitations of current testing programs in assessing what deaf and hard-of-hearing students know, and (c) it will offer some insights and suggestions for future testing programs for deaf and hard-of-hearing students.

Recently, educational researchers and practitioners have turned to value-added models to evaluate teacher performance. Although value-added estimates depend on the assessment used to measure student achievement, the importance of outcome selection has received scant attention in the literature. Using data from a large, urban school district, I examine whether value-added estimates from three separate reading achievement tests provide similar answers about teacher performance. I find moderate-sized rank correlations, ranging from 0.15 to 0.58, between the estimates derived from different tests. Although the tests vary to some degree in content, scaling, and sample of students, these factors do not explain the differences in teacher effects. Instead, test timing and measurement error contribute substantially to the instability of value-added estimates across tests.

Relations between children's sleep and cognitive functioning were examined over 2 years, and race and socioeconomic status were assessed as moderators of effects. Third-grade African American and European American children (N = 166; M = 8.72 years) participated at Time 1 and again 2 years later (N = 132). At both Time 1 and Time 2, sleep was examined via self-report and actigraphy. Children were administered selected tests from the Woodcock-Johnson III Tests of Cognitive Abilities, and Stanford Achievement Test scores were obtained from schools. Children's sleep was related to intellectual ability and academic achievement. Results build substantially on an emerging literature supportive of the importance of sleep in children.

Recent years have seen the convergence of two major policy streams in U.S. K-12 education: standards/accountability and teacher quality reforms. Work in these areas has led to the creation of multiple measures of teacher quality, including measures of their instructional alignment to standards/assessments, observational and student survey measures of pedagogical quality, and measures of teachers' contributions to student test scores. This article is the first to explore the extent to which teachers' instructional alignment is associated with their contributions to student learning and their effectiveness on new composite evaluation measures using data from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Measures of Effective Teaching study. Finding surprisingly weak associations, we discuss potential research and policy implications for both streams of policy.

School vouchers are the most contentious form of parental school choice. Vouchers provide government funds that parents can use to send their children to private schools of their choice. Here we examine the empirical question of whether or not a school voucher program in Washington, DC, affected achievement or the rate of high school graduation for participating students. The District of Columbia Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP) has operated in the nations capital since 2004, funded by a federal government appropriation. Because the program was oversubscribed in its early years of operation, and vouchers were awarded by lottery, we were able to use the \"gold standard\" evaluation method of a randomized experiment to determine what impacts the OSP had on student outcomes. Our analysis revealed compelling evidence that the DC voucher program had a positive impact on high school graduation rates, suggestive evidence that the program increased reading achievement, and no evidence that it affected math achievement. We discuss the implications of these findings in light of recent policy developments including the reauthorization of the OSP and the enactment or expansion of more than a dozen school voucher or voucher-type programs throughout the United States in 2011 and 2012.

We estimate the effects of relative age in kindergarten using data from an experiment where children of the same age were randomly assigned to different kindergarten classmates. We exploit the resulting experimental variation in relative age in conjunction with variation in expected kindergarten entry age based on birthdate to account for negative selection of some of the older school entrants. We find that, holding constant own age, having older classmates on average improves educational outcomes, increasing test scores up to eight years after kindergarten, and raising the probability of taking a college-entry exam. These findings suggest that delaying kindergarten entry, or so-called academic “redshirting,” does not harm other children—and may in fact benefit them—consistent with positive spillovers from higher-scoring or better-behaved peers.

How do proficiency-based accountability systems affect inequality in academic achievement? This article reconciles mixed findings in the literature by demonstrating that three factors jointly determine accountability's impact. First, by analyzing student-level data from a large urban school district, we find that when educators face accountability pressure, they focus attention on students closest to proficiency. We refer to this practice as educational triage and show that the difficulty of the proficiency standard affects whether lower or higher performing students gain most on high-stakes tests used to evaluate schools. Less difficult proficiency standards decrease inequality in high-stakes achievement, while more difficult standards increase it. Second, we show that educators emphasize test-specific skills with students near proficiency, a practice we refer to as instructional triage. As a result, the effects of accountability pressure differ across high-and low-stakes tests; we find no effects on inequality in low-stakes reading and math tests of similar skills. Finally, we provide suggestive evidence that instructional triage is most pronounced in the lowest performing schools. We conclude by discussing how these findings shape our understanding of accountability's effects on educational inequality.