Lessons Learned: The Promise and Possibility of Educational Accountability in the United States

This chapter reviews educational reform efforts in the United States beginning with the National Commission on Excellence in Education in 1981 and traces how student assessment has come to be associated with large-scale, centralized, high-impact testing. This approach has been instrumental in aligning curriculum to standards and disaggregating results to focus attention on student groups. However, unintended consequences have narrowed the curriculum, decreased time for instruction, and pushed students out of school.

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