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This edition of the Reimagining College Access newsletter contains information on the Recognition Task Force, Technology Tool Task Force, Leading Places Network Task Force, and a feature story on Big Picture Education Australia.

This brief describes performance assessments and their value for guiding and evaluating high school students' learning, as well as informing colleges and universities about what students know and can do. It explores state and local policies that support the use of such assessments, along with emerging higher education efforts to incorporate them in college admission, placement, and advising. It discusses steps that can help ensure that performance assessments are high-quality, rigorous, and well understood and that can facilitate the use of these assessments in higher education decisions.

A new study looks at the use of performance assessments for both K-12 learning and college admission, placement and advising. The study is the first research produced through Reimagining College Access, a national initiative of the Learning Policy Institute and EducationCounsel that for the first time brings together k-12 and higher education policy and practice leaders to recognize and foster high-quality k–12 performance assessment systems.

Effective professional development is critical to helping teachers learn and refine the pedagogies required to teach 21st-century skills. This fact sheet, published by LPI and the California Standards Technical Assistance Network (CalSTAN), explores the design and implementation of effective professional development models to help California schools maximize this important investment.

For many years, states and the federal government have been creating a range of schooling options for students, and the focus of the new Administration on expanding choice is likely to accelerate this trend. This report examines the status of current educational options for U.S. students and what state policymakers can do to create high-quality opportunities that offer each family a system of schools worth choosing.

Education policymakers working to address the impacts of growing economic and racial inequality on students often look to community schools as an effective approach for supporting students and their families in communities facing concentrated poverty. This report, which synthesizes findings from 143 rigorous research studies, finds community schools can improve outcomes for all students, and especially those facing lack of access to high-quality schools and out-of-school barriers to learning.

Education policymakers working to address the impacts of growing economic and racial inequality on students often look to community schools as an effective approach for supporting students and their families in communities facing concentrated poverty. This brief and related report synthesizes findings from 143 rigorous research studies and finds that community schools can improve outcomes for all students, especially those facing lack of access to high-quality schools and out-of-school barriers to learning.

For decades, some politicians and pundits have argued that “money does not make a difference” for school outcomes. While it is certainly possible to spend money poorly, this viewpoint is strongly contradicted by a large body of evidence from rigorous empirical research. This document presents a brief explanation of the goal of school finance reforms, followed by summaries of the main bodies of evidence that illustrate how equitable and adequate school funding improves student outcomes.