The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) opened up new possibilities for how student and school success are defined and supported in American public education. States have greater responsibility for designing and building their assessment and accountability systems. These new opportunities to develop performance assessments are critically important to provide incentives for teaching the more complex skills students increasingly need to succeed in the rapidly evolving U.S. society and economy. The modern workplace requires students to demonstrate well-developed thinking skills, problem solving abilities, design strategies, and communication capabilities that cannot be assessed by most currently used tests. This paper discusses four models for integrating performance-based components into assessment systems, all of which have been used successfully at scale in states and nations around the world. It also discusses what is needed to assure validity, reliability, and comparability in the use of such assessments. These models--which can also be combined in various ways--include: (1) Performance items; (2) Curriculum-embedded tasks; (3) Portfolios or collections of evidence; and (4) Comprehensive assessment systems. In each case, the paper describes what states and some nations have done and are doing to develop and implement sound assessments in terms of design, implementation, and scoring. It also outlines what research has found in terms of productive practices in developing performance assessment practices that produce strong outcomes for teaching and learning. [For the related research brief, see ED606778.]