Accountability: Do high-stakes systems raise student achievement? - Access related research titles from the ECS Research Studies Database. Links embedded in titles will take you to each study's major findings and recommendations....

Don't Count Us Out: How An Overreliance on Accountability Could Undermine the Public's Confidence in Schools, Business, Government, and More - This report describes a potentially corrosive gap between the way leaders in government, business, education, health care and other sectors define accountability and the way typical Americans think about it. (Kettering Foundation and Public Agenda, August 2011)...

Getting Value Out of Value-Added: Report of a Workshop - Value-added methods refer to efforts to estimate the relative contributions of specific teachers, schools or programs to student test performance. The National Research Council and the National Academy of Education held a workshop, summarized in this volume, to help identify areas of emerging consensus and areas of disagreement regarding appropriate uses of value-added methods, in an effort to provide research-based guidance to policy makers who are facing decisions about whether to proceed in this direction. (National Academy of Sciences, January 2010)...

Mining the Opportunities in "Differentiated Accountability": Lessons From the No Child Left Behind Pilots in Four States - This report is based on CEP's review of differentiated accountability documents and interviews with a selection of state, district and school officials in Georgia, Maryland, New York and Ohio. The report notes the key findings which emerged, the common themes across the states, and describes the detail the differentiated accountability systems in the four states. (Center on Education Policy, August 2009)...

Organizational Improvement and Accountability: Lessons for Education from Other Sectors - Examining five accountability models drawn from manufacturing, government, the legal profession and health care, the authors seek ways that these practices can be applied to education, and what the implications of that application might be. A summary of the report also is available. (Brian Stecher and Sheila Nataraj Kirby, editors, RAND Corporation, 2004)...

A Case Study of Selected Schools in Economically Disadvantaged Districts - This document presents findings of studies on a number of schools with sudden and dramatic improvement in student performance on reading and math assessments to determine if those were sustained; and if so, what factors contributed to the schools' success. (Richard Tappan, The National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment, February 2003)...

Toward a Framework for Validating Gains Under High-Stakes Conditions - It's not clear what student score increases mean in a high-stakes environment -- a problem with using them to determine rewards, sanctions or student promotion status. It’s important to make sure that gains in test scores reflect gains in student learning, not just “teaching to the test.” This technical report classifies different types of test preparation – some of which provide meaningful test gains (teaching more, working harder and more effectively) and some that don’t (narrowing the curriculum, coaching on specific content and test-taking strategies, and cheating). It also provides a framework for making sure test gains are valid. (Daniel Koretz, CRESST/Harvard Graduate School of Education; and Daniel McCaffrey and Laura Hamilton, CRESST/RAND Education, December 2001)...