This brief discusses ways to measure and report school quality. At present, the differences in state accountability systems make comparisons of schools and school systems very difficult. The most common approach to reporting school status is in the context of current status, an approach in which the school mean or median score for students in the grade assessed is reported. A preferable approach is to place greater emphasis on improvement than on current status. One way to do this is to compare test scores between 2 years but for the same grade. Another way is to track the performance of students from one grade to the next. An alternative is to base the accountability on a comparison of the performance of all students in the school in one grade in one year with the performance of all students in the next grade tested the next year. This is the quasi-longitudinal approach. Some states report similar schools' scores as a way to account for the effects of socioeconomic status. No reporting method is without some disadvantages, but some recommendations can be made to improve reporting for accountability purposes: (1) place more emphasis on school improvement than on current performance; (2) report the margin of error for any school result; (3) evaluate the validity of the uses and interpretations of assessment results; and (4) validate trends with results from other indicators, such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress or other tests. (Contains 10 references.) (SLD)