High-Stakes Accountability and Teacher Quality

High-stakes accountability has been part of the education policy landscape for many years. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, states throughout the country increasingly developed testing and accountability policies to monitor school performance. As a result of these efforts, states implemented policies to encourage higher levels of student achievement (Olson, 2006). The federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 shifted this state trend to the national level by requiring states to monitor student achievement as a condition of federal compensatory education funding.