Accountability has become a primary function of large-scale testing in the United States. The pressure on educators to raise scores is vastly greater than it was several decades ago. Research has shown that high-stakes testing can generate behavioral responses that inflate scores, often severely. I argue that because of these responses, using…

Every year, newspaper articles and news releases from education departments around the nation report that test scores are up again, often dramatically. The main story line is usually positive: performance is getting better, and rapidly. Unfortunately, this good news is often more apparent than real. Scores on the tests used for accountability have…

The insightful discussions by Raudenbush, Rubin, Stuart and Zanutto (RSZ) and Reckase identify important challenges for interpreting the output of VAM and for its use with test-based accountability. As these authors note, VAM are statistical models for the correlations among scores from students who share common teachers or schools during the…

This document presents standards for educational accountability systems that represent models of practice derived from three perspectives: research knowledge, practical experience, and ethical considerations. These standards should be conceived of as targets for state and local systems and as criteria to judge proposed models of accountability…