Recent educational accountability efforts have married student assessments with reform mandates and sanctions. As a result, students--beginning in early elementary grades--are feeling the pressures of this new era of high-stakes accountability. This article chronicles a story of the consequences of high-stakes testing on a father and his son.…

The National Assessment Program--Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN)--is conducted through standardized tests that are administered to all Australian students in Years 3, 5, 7, and 9. It was implemented in 2008 by the same Labor government that introduced My School (www.myschool.edu.au). Enjoying bipartisan political support and popular with the public…

Every year, newspaper articles and news releases from education departments around the nation report that test scores are up again, often dramatically. The main story line is usually positive: performance is getting better, and rapidly. Unfortunately, this good news is often more apparent than real. Scores on the tests used for accountability have…

The authors advance an argument that placing observation of actual teaching as a central feature of accountability frameworks, teacher preparation, and basic science could result in substantial improvements in instruction and related social processes and a science of the production of teaching and teachers. Teachers' behavioral interactions with…

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 requires public schools in the United States to test students in grades 3-8. The author argues that this mandate has been supported by the public, in part, because of the "availability heuristic," a phenomenon which occurs when people assess the probability of an event by the ease with which instances…