This chapter examines the consequences of student accountability testing for: (1) the nature and quality of teaching, including the curriculum emphases and teaching strategies adopted in the classroom; and (2) the teaching workforce, including the quality of teachers who are recruited and retained in teaching in different schools and districts.

This article focuses on inequalities in children's access to qualified teachers, documenting the disproportionate assignment of untrained and uncredentialed teachers to students in high-minority, low-income schools and the effects that large concentrations of such teachers have on students' opportunities to learn.

This article argues that testing is information for an accountability system; it is not the system itself.

Standards-based reform was proposed as a means to bring coherence to the education system and trigger reforms and investments targeted at greater learning. These benefits have materialized in some states but not others, depending on their strategies for change. This article proposes mid-course corrections needed to ensure that standards-based reforms support student success, rather than punishing those who are already underserved.

The author responds to Dale Ballou and Michael Podgursky's critique of What Matters Most, the report of the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, and details the research support for the National Commission's recommendations.

In this chapter, I outline the case for investments in teacher education, review some recent findings about the features of particularly powerful programs of preservice teacher preparation, and discuss the policy changes that would be needed to create such programs on a wide scale.

Prepared for the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future

Using data from a set of case studies of schools currently involved in assessment development, we describe in this chapter how the development of authentic assessment practices within schools can create a dynamic process of staff development and school development. This dynamic is set in motion as teachers struggle to articulate their goals and standards, look for and create common ground in their views of subjects and students, reflect on their practice, and attend to learners and learning in new ways.

In this chapter we argue that major changes in American society are producing a radically different mission for schools--a mission requiring new conceptions of accountability tied to new roles for teachers. Social requirements are pressing for forms of schooling and teaching that will ensure high levels of student learning for all rather than the traditional school outcomes of success for some and failure for many others. This means that schools must find ways to reach diverse learners effectively rather than being accountable merely for "offering education" or "delivering instruction" regardless of the outcomes.

This article explores the contributions of professionalism to school accountability in the context of a new phenomenon in American education: the professional development school.

Declaring that "the foundation of a profession is not permission to practice autonomously, it is shared responsibility for collectively shaping standards of professional practice," Linda Darling-Hammond speaks to the differential staffing and professional development school proposals of the Holmes Group. However, her central concern is with the nature of good teaching itself.

This article argues that the most critical issue facing American education today is the professionalization of teaching. Professionalization involves not only the status and compensation accorded to the members of an occupation; it involves the extent to which members of that occupation maintain control over the content of their work and the degree to which society values the work of that occupation.