Accountability

Accountability Resources

The Center for Assessment partners with education leaders to design, refine, and evaluate accountability systems that balance equity, transparency, and technical rigor. Grounded in research and best practices, our work ensures these systems address local priorities while meeting high standards for validity and utility. We provide thought leadership on reimagining accountability frameworks to better support educational equity, improve outcomes, and enhance stakeholder trust. Whether building new systems or optimizing existing ones, we collaborate to create solutions that drive meaningful, sustainable improvements in schools and student learning.


Recent Accountability Projects

Accountability Documentation

The New Mexico Public Education Department is developing technical documentation of the state’s accountability system. The goal of this work is to increase transparency and ensure year-to-year consistency in implementation of the accountability business rules.

Setting Accountability Performance Standards

The Arkansas Department of Education is designing a process to establish new standards for the state’s school accountability system. It will consider a school’s performance across multiple prioritized measures and allow grades to be reported for overall school performance and for two or more priority indicators.

Modeling Growth In Delaware

In state accountability systems, it is important that each indicator provide valuable and independent information about schools. A team from the Center—Senior Associates Will Lorié and Damian Betebenner and Executive Director Scott Marion—is working with a Delaware advisory group to investigate ways to model student academic growth.


Recent Accountability Blog Posts

Focusing State Educational Accountability Systems: Four Methods of Judging Quality and Progress

Dale Carlson, a member of the Center for Assessment’s board of directors, outlined a framework in this seminal 2002 paper […]
September 6, 2006

Developing a Value Table for Alaska’s Public School Performance Incentive Program

This paper outlines the process by which Alaska established the Value Table it is proposing for its school performance incentive […]
July 31, 2006

Dealing With Flexibility in Assessments for Students With Significant Cognitive Disabilities

This paper analyzes and describes the flexibility or unintended variation in alternate assessments on alternate achievement standards in an effort […]
April 12, 2006

Using Value Tables for a School-Level Accountability System

A paper presented at a symposium during the 2006 NCME Annual Conference that outlines the process of using Value Tables […]
April 6, 2006

Incorporating Growth Models into AYP Determinations: NCME 2006 Growth Pre-session Materials

This workshop, associated with the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME) 2006 meeting in San Francisco, was designed to […]
April 4, 2006

Using Value Tables to Explicitly Value Growth

A presentation, given at the 2005 MARCES Conference on Longitudinal Modeling of Student Achievement, that outlines issues associated with using […]
November 6, 2005

2005 Reidy Interactive Lecture Series

Wrestling With High School Assessment and Accountability September 29th – 30th Agenda Session I Overview of High School Goals and […]
September 30, 2005

A Framework for High School Accountability

This presentation outlines a framework for designing high school accountability systems including considerations of multiple levels of the educational system […]
September 28, 2005

Roles of Local Assessments in State Accountability Systems

This presentation provides an overview of how local assessments may be used in relation to state accountability systems, and outlines […]
June 20, 2005

Documenting the Validity of Accountability Systems: A Progress Report

This presentation provides an approach for thinking about the validity of accountability systems, and provides several examples of how system […]
June 19, 2005