New York Charter Schools Association Selects CTB/McGraw-Hill to Provide Special Assessment Access and Services to Members

MONTEREY, Calif., Dec. 15, 2011 /PRNewswire/ --  CTB/McGraw-Hill, one of the country's leading educational assessment partners, today announced a collaboration with the New York Charter Schools Association to provide association members with access to high-quality CTB/McGraw-Hill custom and shelf assessments. Through the partnership, the association's schools will be able to purchase select CTB products and customized professional development services.

"Access to CTB/McGraw-Hill's high-quality assessment tools is a huge benefit for our service member schools," said Bill Phillips, president of the New York Charter Schools Association, which serves the majority of New York's charter schools and is the leading advocate for high-performing charter schools across the state. "We are proud to link our network of charter schools with CTB/McGraw-Hill, which is a proven leader in the assessment field and has strong charter school experience."

As part of the partnership, the association has named CTB/McGraw-Hill a "preferred vendor" for five of the company's assessment products:

• Acuity Informative Assessment^™ solution, an award-winning benchmark interim assessment that helps teachers effectively gauge performance and deliver tailored instruction for every student. Used by more than 100,000 teachers and 1.5 million students nationwide, Acuity offers a new generation of assessment, enabling educators to deliver the most effective data-driven instruction and supporting schools' gradual and effective transition to teaching and learning relative to the new Common Core State Standards. Acuity continues to support grades 3-8 and now features new assessment solutions to help high school students succeed in a 21st century, global workforce.
• TerraNova™, Third Edition, the most respected, valid and innovative national standardized achievement test on the market, measures K-12 skills, identifies strengths and weaknesses and guides instruction. By integrating assessment and reporting options, it translates data into information that educators can use to improve instruction.
• LAS Links®, an integrated suite of K-12 English language proficiency assessments that address the full range of assessment needs – from gauging the abilities of new students and measuring their progress to providing lesson plans, instructional tools and training materials. LAS Links is now available in an online format as well.
• Writing Roadmap™, an online essay scoring tool available for grades 3–12, college and adult learning that provides continual practice and automatic feedback. Writing Roadmap's easy-to-use interface and instructional tools motivate and guide students through each step of the writing process.
• Fox in a Box®, an early literacy tool that enables educators to gain diagnostic information through one-on-one interviews that help identify struggling readers and their learning needs. It also monitors each child's progress on literacy benchmarks.

"We are proud to partner with the New York Charter Schools Association and its impressive membership," said Ellen Haley, president of CTB/McGraw-Hill. "We are looking forward to working with some of New York's finest charter schools, providing them with assessment solutions and services that will ultimately improve teacher instruction and student achievement."

The collaboration will help the association's schools to effectively use data generated from student assessments to personalize their instruction to meet each student's learning needs. It offers another important benefit: teacher professional development in the form of one-on-one consultant and complimentary webinars.

About CTB/McGraw-Hill

CTB/McGraw-Hill has an 85-year record of innovation and excellence in assessment, and serves more than 18 million students in all 50 states and in 49 countries. One of the first American publishers to introduce objective, standardized achievement tests to schools, today CTB/McGraw-Hill is a leader in testing with recognized products for online interim and formative, adult, and language proficiency assessment. Dedicated to advancing the use of student performance data to inform instructional decision making, CTB/McGraw-Hill's innovation continues today with technologies that include Web-based assessment and reporting, student response device (clicker) software, and artificial intelligence for automated scoring of student essays. CTB/McGraw-Hill is part of McGraw-Hill Education, a division of The McGraw-Hill Companies (NYSE: MHP). McGraw-Hill Education is a leading global provider of instructional, assessment and reference solutions that empower professionals and students of all ages. For more information, visit CTB.com.

About the New York Charter Schools Association

The New York Charter Schools Association (NYCSA) is the statewide membership organization serving a majority of New York's public charter schools, and is the leading advocate for a high-performing charter sector.  NYCSA's policy and advocacy support protects the autonomy and independence schools need to fulfill their tremendous promise and maintain high performance, while membership services assist schools at every stage in their life-cycle.  New ideas, better schools.  For more information, please visit: www.nycsa.org.       

Media Contact

Tom Stanton
Director, Communications
McGraw-Hill Education
Phone: 212.904.3214
[email protected]

SOURCE CTB/McGraw-Hill