Accountability Swiss Cheese

This Barbara Hollingsworth column about VA’s Fairfax County is occasioning a lot of buzz but the various ways accountability systems get gamed.   But it’s a much broader problem.  A few years ago ES put out a primer on how No Child Left Behind’s accountability rules work (pdf).  Now it’s been updated and re-released to reflect policy changes(pdf).  Useful if you want to understand how this all actually works…and why for instance when a state or school tells you that a school missed the mark for “adequate yearly progress” by just one student they’re not telling you nearly the whole truth…