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

Using Student Data for School Accountability: An Overview

This presentation provides an overview of different types of school performance, including student growth, and introduces key issues in defining […]
June 19, 2005

Establishing a Value Table for Alaska

An explanation of the process used to generate a value table recommended for use in measuring growth in Alaska.
June 13, 2005

Measuring Student Growth Through Value Tables

Slides of a paper presenting introductory concepts of value tables, presented at the Council of Chief State School Officers’ Large […]
June 13, 2005

Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Adjusting AYP Workbooks to Increase Reliability & Validity

This presentation advocates several practical changes to increase reliability and validity of No Child Left Behind school accountability decisions, notably […]
April 13, 2005

Keeping the Baby and (Most of) the Bathwater: Mid-course Adjustments to NCLB’s AYP

This presentation, from NCME’s 2005 conference, describes several adjustments that could be made to increase the validity of adequate-yearly-progress (AYP) […]
April 11, 2005

No Child Left Behind: Grappling With “Adequate Yearly Progress”

Ten suggestions for improving accountability issues caused by the technical implementation of the adequate-yearly-progress (AYP) rules of No Child Left […]
November 17, 2004

Models for Using Student Growth Measures in School Accountability

This presentation examines design decisions policymakers should consider when deciding if and how to incorporate student growth or value-added models […]
November 14, 2004

2004 Reidy Interactive Lecture Series

Incorporating Measures of Student Growth Into State Accountability Systems October 7th – 8th Agenda Session I Validity Considerations When Measuring […]
October 8, 2004

Models for School Accountability and Program Evaluation

An overview of various ways of looking at school performance, starting from simple scale score means to complex, conditioned, multi-level […]
October 6, 2004

Distributing the Responsibility for Student Learning

In this presentation for the annual CRESST Conference, Scott Marion proposes a distributed accountability system for student learning.
September 8, 2004