This paper provides an overview of national and state efforts to address school-performance scores as a means of monitoring local school productivity for the 21st century. School-accountability report cards were introduced in the early 1990s to provide parents and others with interesting and useful information about schools. However, many of these report cards appeared to provide little comparative information about one school's achievement over another. As a result of this deficiency, the late 1990s brought a refinement in the report-card process. State legislatures and departments of public education began to design and mandate additional qualifying instruments to measure and compare the effectiveness of local schools. Thus, local school performance scores (SPS) have been instituted in many states as a process to compare the progress of schools toward predetermined benchmarks of effectiveness over time. A number of states have also attached rewards or sanctions to the progress of local schools toward their growth goals. Some states even rank and compare each school's SPS to those of others within the state. (Contains 10 references.) (DFR)