Few analyses have examined what testing's political status means for how those outside the education establishment view externally mandated tests and what they expect them to accomplish. This article provides such an analysis by first elaborating on the notion that testing and accountability have become political issues. It then describes the…

Today, educators are expected to achieve high standards of learning for all students as they face the rapid changes brought about by the technologies and social challenges of this age. However, their expectations of what schools can do are really still an expression of their cultural anxieties. In a basic way, these challenges are the same as they…

Student achievement test results are the coin of the realm in educational accountability systems in the United States. For a number of years, both states and the federal government have relied heavily on tests to judge the quality of schools. The exact characteristics of the accountability systems have evolved over the years and vary a good deal…

No one can dispute that tests should measure important content, and for many (but not all) purposes, tests should be aligned with curricular goals. Thus in many cases, alignment is clearly better than the alternative, and nothing that follows here argues otherwise. Unfortunately, however, this does not imply that alignment is sufficient protection…

In this article, the authors aim to present and discuss competing accountability approaches, or models, designed to systematically indicate how a school's students are performing academically. Within the framework of the current federally mandated accountability legislation, increased interest in models measuring school performance has caused…

This chapter provides an overview of statistical issues arising in work on educational assessment and school accountability, organized around some of the most consequential misunderstandings. The article proceeds via a series of nine vignettes describing misunderstandings of statistical uncertainty in educational assessment and school…

A fair and valid assessment for every child, as mandated by legislation such as the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001 and the Improving America's School Act of 1994, must consider the complexity inherent in assessments for subgroups of students. Due to the rapid growth of the population of English language learners (ELLs) in the United…

Current national efforts at education reform rely largely on the use of standardized testing, the cornerstone of federal education policy as a result of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001, with its requirements for regular testing of all students and demonstrations of adequate yearly progress on tests by all schools. The challenges…

In 1996, Chicago became the epicenter for this debate when it "ended social promotion" in the third, sixth, and eighth grades. While not the first, Chicago's initiative has been the most sustained to date and has produced the clearest evidence of positive as well as negative results. Test scores rose rapidly after the institution of high-stakes…

Most other nations have a very different approach to measuring academic achievement at the end of high school and signaling that information to universities and other interested parties. In Australia, Denmark, England, Scotland, Finland, France, Ireland, the Netherlands, and many Canadian and German provinces, for example, high school exit…

While some proponents of testing rest their hopes for stronger learning on the expectation that tests alone will motivate students to work harder, most posit that better learning will result primarily from better teaching--due to curriculum changes, greater attention to student needs, stronger teacher motivation, or focused investments in…

In 1922 Edward Thorndike wrote, "The task of education is to make changes in human beings. For mastery in this task, one needs definite and exact knowledge of what changes are made and what ought to be made". Seventy-nine years after he wrote these words, the 2001 No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation stated, "Schools must have clear, measurable…

In this article, the author approaches accountability testing from a more micro level and offers a response to the question, "What can be done to get assessment right at the classroom level?" The author's answer refers back to accountability issues by considering that class of assessments most commonly used for such a purpose, herein referred to…

Over the last 20 years, writing about technology (and more recently about its use in assessment systems) has been a joyful experience, in part because the author was usually right about how fast and how unexpected technology progress would be made. In this article, the author suggests to rethink assessment systems from design perspectives and the…

Few educational issues have received more attention in recent times than the problem of ensuring that the U.S.'s elementary and secondary classrooms are all staffed with quality teachers. Although ensuring that the nation's classrooms are all staffed with quality teachers is a perennially important issue in schools, it is also among the most…