Alternative education has its own history. Having emerged in the sixties as a response to the social crisis, its goal was primarily to fight increasing bureaucracy and the depersonalization of public education by giving students more freedom and minimal adult supervision. In the eighties, the understanding of "alternative education" narrowed to mean educating students who were at risk of failure. During this period, many schools experimented with curricula, mainly striving to evoke and sustain student interest. Some schools focused on vocational training through partnerships with businesses, some established connections with colleges and promoted academic interests, and some chose no-grading course formats that many students found very appealing. No Child Left Behind (NCLB) brought a drastic change to alternative education. NCLB mandated that all schools, including alternative, focus on performance and meet annual measurable objectives in core subjects and certain other criteria, such as attendance or graduation rates. Although alternative high schools account only for slightly more than 1% of student population, their numbers are on the rise, partially as a response to NCLB and as an attempt to reconnect to education options those nearly 4 million young people who are not in school and do not have a high school diploma (Aron, 2006). In this article, the authors believe that alternative education schools and centers should be fully accountable and held to the same standards as any other schools when it comes to student performance. Some criteria that work well for the traditional school model, however, such as graduation or attendance rates, cannot be mechanically applied to alternative schools.