District Accountability Without a State Assessment: A Proposed Model

Most states have adopted assessment and accountability systems that involve common measures of student performance. A state assessment system that allows school districts to choose the specific strategies they use to measure student performance on state‐adopted content standards presents a unique state accountability challenge. The authors propose an accountability model that addresses this challenge using a combination of student performance, technical quality, and noncognitive indicators of performance. They also describe a study that evaluated the proposed model using data from all school districts in a southern state.