In this state, one constant that students with disabilities have experienced has been the lack of accessibility to the high-stakes standardized test, the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS). The purpose of this Action Research study was to investigate and improve the access, to MCAS testing for students with disabilities in…

Paulo Freire's influential concept of "banking" education describes an oppressive process that positions teachers as the "depositors" of knowledge into passive student "receptacles." However, according to Freire, teachers also have an "ontological vocation to be more fully human" that can only be achieved…

This study examines how three bilingual education teachers engaged with a transitional bilingual policy while balancing the demands of monolingual high-stakes assessments in ways that contributed to advocacy on behalf of their bilingual learners. The consequences of high-stakes accountability can be exacerbated in bilingual settings, because in…

The purpose of my study is to explore the stories of the ethical tensions K-12 educational administrators navigate when implementing high-stakes assessment policy in a culture of measurement during testing season. Some educational leaders, in particular K-12 school and district administrators, struggle with the tensions existing between their own…

Policymakers usually leave decisions about scaling the scores used for accountability to their appointed technical advisory committees and the testing contractors. However, scaling decisions can have an appreciable impact on school ratings. Using middle-school data from New York State, we examined the consistency of school ratings based on two…

Data use is considered a key lever in school improvement processes, but the punitive pressure of high-stakes accountability can influence whether or not data use is enacted in ways which facilitate improvement. School leaders must learn to respond to high-stakes accountability in ways which lead teachers to feel safe, efficacious, and agentic with…

This constructivist study investigates and captures the lived experiences of three social studies educators as they make sense of civic education in a climate of high stakes testing and accountability. In spite of the deterioration of civic education over the years (Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools, 2011), Florida was among the first…

Students may not fully demonstrate their knowledge and skills on accountability tests if there are no stakes attached to individual performance. In that case, assessment results may not accurately reflect student achievement, so the validity of score interpretations and uses suffers. For this study, matched samples of students taking state…

This celebrated narrative shows how a teacher, alongside his 5th-grade students, co-created a curriculum based on the students' needs, interests, and questions. Follow Brian Schultz and his students from a Chicago housing project as they work together to develop an emergent and authentic curriculum based on what is most important to the…

Critics of test-based accountability warn that test preparation has a negative influence on teachers' instruction due to a focus on procedural skills. Others advocate that the adoption of more rigorous assessments may be a way to incentivize more ambitious test preparation instruction. Drawing on classroom observations and teacher surveys, we do…

In the current context of high stakes testing, school literacy is often defined by standardized literacy assessments--most state tests require students to demonstrate proficiency on specific kinds of writing tasks and reading material. Today, where schools and teachers exist in an environment of increased accountability, stakeholders who…

Test-based accountability often produces score inflation. Most studies have evaluated inflation by comparing trends on a high-stakes test and a lower stakes audit test. However, Koretz and Beguin (2010) noted weaknesses of audit tests and suggested self-monitoring assessments (SMAs), which incorporate audit items into high-stakes tests. This…

School performance pressures apply disproportionately to tested grades and subjects. Using longitudinal administrative data--including achievement data from untested grades--and teacher survey data from a large urban district, we examine schools' responses to those pressures in assigning teachers to high-stakes and low-stakes classrooms. We find…

English language proficiency assessments (ELPA) are used in the United States to measure annually the English language progress and proficiency of English-language learners (ELLs), a subgroup of language minority students who receive language acquisition support mandated and largely funded by Title III (NCLB, 2001). ELPA proficient and…

If there is one thing that describes the trajectory of American education, it is this: more high-stakes testing. In the United States, the debates surrounding this trajectory can be so fierce that it feels like we are in uncharted waters. As Christopher Bjork reminds us in this study, however, we are not the first to make testing so central to…