ABSTRACT
Since its passage, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) has dominated discussions of educational accountability and testing. Yet, NCLB is just one part of a larger controversy surrounding test-based accountability in public education that predates the federal legislation. The issue is how standardized test results should be used. Should they serve as one among several indicators of school quality or as the sole or dominant measure? Should they be part of a low-stakes accountability system providing data about public school performance under the assumption that information alone will lead people to act? Or, should the system be high stakes with tangible rewards and sanctions attached to test data as a goad to action. Although NCLB represents a major milestone in the move to a high-stakes system, the trend began a decade earlier with state policies that rewarded and sanctioned local districts and individual schools on the basis of their students’ test scores.
