Education Next – Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst
“In the U.S., the principal lever for K-12 public education reform for the last 40 years has been test-based accountability. Prior to the 1970s, individual school districts bore nearly all of the responsibility for determining what the students within their purview needed to know and be able to do to advance from grade to grade and graduate from high school. Districts, in turn, deeded this responsibility to teachers in the form of the end-of-year or end-of-course grades they assigned to their students.” (more)