Current context for educational reform in the United States is codified in revisions of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965. Periodic reauthorizations reflect changing national and educational landscapes (Klein, 2015). The most recent reauthorization, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) of 2015 (USDE, 2015), is currently undergoing the regulatory process and is scheduled to go into effect during the 2017-2018 school year (USDE, 2017). This paper will examine the impact of standards based accountability (SBA) reform within a changing national context from the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) reauthorization of 2002 (USDE, 2002) to ESSA in 2015 through the Texas context of SBA, a descriptive analysis of types of standards, and a statistical analysis of performance by cohort from 2013 to 2016.