The current NCLB/ESSA-generation [No Child Left Behind/Every Student Succeeds Act] of pre-service teachers in the U.S. received their K-12 schooling during the standardized test-focused education accountability era. There is little research exploring how they perceive the disconnect between their K-12 teacher-centered, test-focused school…

Those who work in second- and foreign-language testing often find Koretz's concern for validity inferences under high-stakes (VIHS) conditions both welcome and familiar. While the focus of the article is more narrowly on the potential for two instructional responses to test-based accountability, "reallocation" and "coaching,"…

The majority of Chicago Public Schools (CPS) students are not attaining the ACT scores they are aiming for, which they need to qualify for scholarships and college acceptance. This report looks at the reasons behind students' low performance and what matters for doing well on this test. CPS students are highly motivated to do well on the ACT, and…

Every spring, education-related newspaper and magazine stories raise the alarm that schools are "teaching to the test." Scores of articles and editorials paint a disheartening picture of frustrated teachers forced to abandon good instructional practices for a relentless stream of worksheets based on boring, repetitive test-preparation…

In the winter and spring of 2007-08, the Center on Education Policy (CEP) expanded its ongoing research on the impact of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) by conducting case studies of six schools in Rhode Island to learn more about the influence of NCLB and related state accountability policies on curriculum, instruction, and student…

The federal journey into public education has followed a long and winding road. Most educators know that the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act is simply the latest version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), which dates all the way back to 1965. In the years since its initial passage, the ESEA road has taken a number of…

No one can dispute that tests should measure important content, and for many (but not all) purposes, tests should be aligned with curricular goals. Thus in many cases, alignment is clearly better than the alternative, and nothing that follows here argues otherwise. Unfortunately, however, this does not imply that alignment is sufficient protection…

This article argues that, with all of its language about reaching "100% proficiency for all students in twelve years" as an "ambitious, but achievable" goal, the current federal administration seems to be on the side of the children in its No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), but further investigation reveals that many of the…