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The education reform movement in the United States has increasingly focused on developing new standards for students. Virtually all states and many districts have begun creating standards for student learning, curriculum frameworks to guide instruction, and assessments to test students' knowledge.
These measures often are accompanied by accountability schemes that reward and sanction students, teachers, and schools based on trends in test scores. Although standards-based reform was intended to leverage systemwide changes in curriculum, teacher preparation, and school resources, in many cases the notions of standards and "accountability" have become synonymous with mandates for student testing that have little connection to policy initiatives that directly address the quality of teaching, the allocation of resources, or the nature of schooling.
Assessment data are helpful for creating more accountable systems to the extent that they provide relevant, valid, timely, and useful information about how individual students are doing and how schools are serving them. Indicators such as test scores are information for the accountability system; they are not the system itself. Accountability occurs only when a useful set of processes exists for interpreting and acting on the information in educationally productive ways. This may seem a straightforward notion, but it is significantly different from the predominant conceptions of accountability in the contemporary policy arena.
ALTERNATIVE APPROACHES TO ACCOUNTABILITY
The American Psychological Association, American Educational Research Association, and the National Council on Measurement in Education have issued standards for the use of tests that indicate that test scores are too limited and unstable a measure to be used as the sole source of information for any major decision about student placement or promotion. The test-based accountability systems in dozens of states and urban school systems stand in contravention to tiiese professional standards. However, the negative effects of grade retention and graduation sanctions should not become an argument for social promotion, the practice of moving students through the system without ensuring that they acquire the skills that they need. The alternatives include at least the following:
* Enhancing preparation and professional development for teachers to ensure that they have the knowledge and skills they need to teach a wide range of students to meet the standards;
* Redesigning school structures to support more intensive learning - including creating...