Pain and Gain

The Implementing Standards-Based Accountability (ISBA) study was designed to examine the strategies that states, districts, and schools are using to implement standards-based accountability under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and how these strategies are associated with classroom practices and student achievement in mathematics and science. This monograph presents the final results of the ISBA project. It contains descriptive information regarding the implementation of NCLB in California, Georgia, and Pennsylvania from 2003a2004 through 2005a2006. It is a companion to MG-589-NSF, Standards-Based Accountability Under No Child Left Behind (2007), and updates those findings with an additional year of data, permitting further analyses of state-to-state differences and longer-term trends. This study suggests that school improvement efforts might be more effective if they were responsive to local conditions and customized to address the specific causes of failure and the capacity of the schools in question.