Union-Funded Study Finds Fault With High-Stakes Testing

New research contending that current accountability pressures have yielded no real achievement gains touched off another round of skirmishing last week over the reliability of a series of union-financed studies criticizing high-stakes testing.

Titled “High-Stakes Testing and Student Achievement: Problems for the No Child Left Behind Act,” the new report concludes that students in states with test-based accountability systems have not shown improvement on national assessments.

Those states also tend to have higher dropout rates and larger numbers of students retained in key grades, problems that disproportionately affect minority...