Assessment success today or learning success tomorrow? How a longitudinal perspective can help standards-based accountability systems eliminate the persistent gap between nominal and actual achievement for high school graduates

Current standards-based accountability systems, exemplified by No Child Left Behind (NCLB), generally rely on successive year comparisons to gauge educational progress and place special emphasis on achievement in elementary school, but include no mechanisms to monitor the degree to which early improvements noted by increases in these successive year comparisons demonstrate genuine improvements in curricular and instructional practice that lead to higher levels of achievement in later grades. The absence of a longitudinal perspective within these standards-based accountability systems means that critical educational decisions such as the continuation or abandonment of practices or programs may be based on incomplete depictions of student achievement. The present study was designed to test and present an alternate method of data analysis that can be used to complement (not replace) the analysis that is typical of current accountability systems, without any additional testing or resources. The study utilized extant student achievement data for reading and math for more than 9,000 students from a large ethnically and economically diverse school district, and compared the results of data analyses typical of current standards-based accountability systems with those using the proposed longitudinal analyses. While the depictions of student achievement presented by the different methods were rather similar for math, they were vastly different for reading, which suggests that the addition of the proposed longitudinal analysis has the potential to enhance current systems such that they provide more complete depictions of student achievement.