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A New Accountability Player: The Local Newspaper

This spring, the Detroit Free Press announced that it would no longer rank schools and districts based simply on scores from statewide tests.

The newspaper reached its verdict after conducting a six-month computer analysis of results from the Michigan Educational Assessment Program. It found that poverty and other factors outside a school's control were so strongly linked to test scores that it made straight-up comparisons "inevitably flawed" and "mostly meaningless."

"I think we realized, with some embarrassment, that we never had any business ranking districts based on MEAP scores," said Tracy Van Moorlehem, the paper's K-12 education reporter. "It's just not fair,...