State and federal accountability policies are predicated on the ability to estimate valid and reliable measures of school impacts on student learning. The typical spring- to-spring testing window potentially conflates the amount of learning that occurs during the school-year with learning that...

Despite their egalitarian ethos, schools are social sorting machines, creating categories that serve as the foundation of later life inequalities. In this review, we apply the theory of categorical inequality to education, focusing particularly on contemporary American schools. We discuss the...