ABSTRACT
In the recent critiques of the effectiveness of American schools, both instructional and assessment practices have come under strong attack. The crux of the matter is that there is a considerable amount of evidence that by the middle grade-school years, the majority of students have acquired many of the basic skills involved in reading (decoding), writing (producing a passable essay), and arithmetic (executing computational algorithms), but seems not to understand those activities in a way that allows them to progress beyond entering levels and become truly proficient. This predicament, common enough among regular division students, is even more pronounced among students in special education settings. The further argument is that this pattern is in good part a consequence of the way in which standard instruction is organized, and that it is then reinforced by accepted assessment practices.
