[M.D. Holloway]

Another Assumption—Dispelled People generally assume that the education policies most visible today will continue unabated into the future. However, evidence shows that many policies are cyclical or gradually weaken until they have little influence. Well before NCLB, some states' test-based accountability programs began with great fanfare only to become largely irrelevant to school policies. It was simply considered educationally unwise—and politically incorrect—to acknowledge large failure rates, with the burden falling disproportionately on students in high-poverty schools. Despite its current dominance in U.S. education policy, NCLB may well suffer the same fate. Opinions differ, of course, on whether weakening test-based accountability would be a positive or negative outcome. If test-based accountability does lose its centrality to U.S. policy, however, we would move closer to education practices in other countries, few of which assess educators' performance on the basis of their students' standardized test scores.

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