ABSTRACT
Hardly a day goes by when a public figure does not call out for greater accountability for public schools. Office-holders and office-seekers, from both inside and outside of education, are likely tomention the improvement of public education as part of their agenda. Most recently, this concern with education and improving public schools, the education reform agenda, has almost become synonymous with large-scale and high-stakes assessment especially as embodied in the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (H.R.1). Significantly, one of the four “pillars” of this national education reformblueprint is accountability and testing (the others include flexibility and local control, funding forwhatworks, and expanded parental options). This legislation, inwhich accountability plays a major role, represents a comprehensive overhaul of existing federal law (Elementary and Secondary Education Act enacted in 1965 and the Improving America’s Schools Act of 1995) and is the principal federal law affecting K-12 education today. Among the accountability
features of the new legislation are stringent requirements for states including:
1. States must develop “adequate yearly progress’’ (AYP) statewidemeasurable objectives for improved achievement for all students and for specific groups: economically disadvantaged students, students from major racial and ethnic groups, students with disabilities, and students with limited English proficiency
2. The objectives must be set with the goal of having all students at the “proficient’’ level or above within 12 years (i.e., by the end of the 2013-2014 school year)
3. AYP must be based primarily on state assessments but also must include an additional academic indicator
4. The AYP objectives must be assessed at the school level. At the endof 2years, schools thathave failed tomeet theirAYobjective for 2 consecutive years will be identified for improvement
5. School AYP results must be reported separately for each group of students identified above so that it can be determined whether each group of students met the AYP objective
6. At least 95%of eachgroupmust participate in state assessments
A related stipulation of this legislation is that states establish performance standards for their tests. As Linn, Baker, and Betebenner (2002) note, some states set high standards not knowing that these would be used to determine AYP objectives. Moreover, virtually no state is close to meeting the goals being set, and in many cases it is not realistic to expect that states will be able to meet the standards. Although this is problematic for all states, it is especially troublesome for states with large numbers of Latino/a students where finding appropriate assessments is challenging andwhere the mechanisms for impacting student progress are not well conceived or implemented.
