The Nebraska STARS plan is ambitious; it is idealistic; it is the right thing to do for the right reasons to get the right results, the authors maintain. Decisions about whether or not students are learning should not take place in the legislature, the governor's office, or the department of education. They should take place in the classroom, because that is where learning occurs. - Douglas Christensen, Commissioner Nebraska Department of Education IN THE SPIRIT typical of independent and hard-working Nebraskans, policy makers and educators are collaboratively building an assessment system that has not been attempted in any other state. The intent of Nebraska's School-based Teacher-led Assessment and Reporting System (STARS) is to do the right things for the right reasons in order to obtain the right results. The STARS plan is very different from other states' school reform approaches that are based on external mandates and compliance. The Nebraska approach to school accountability is internal. It is based on the premise of school improvement, and, according to Chris Gallagher, it gives educators seat at the table.1 Gallagher's premise is accurate. As a 26-year veteran Nebraska educator, I have participated in this process on both the local and state levels. In each role - that of a teacher, an administrator, and now a state facilitator - I have had the opportunity to be seated at the table and to contribute to Nebraska's plan, which will measure and validate student learning and high-quality teaching. The STARS plan brings together the best of both worlds: student learning is foremost, but public accountability is provided as well. Indeed, STARS places the responsibility of teaching and learning where it belongs. The teachers and administrators who create high-quality learning environments in the 585 school districts in the state will be directly involved in affirming the quality and in measuring the learning of the students in their classrooms. Why Would Nebraska Choose to Be Different? As the 49th state to adopt an assessment system, Nebraska has learned from the challenges and problems faced by other states that have implemented single tests or high-stakes accountability models. Nebraskans have made a deliberate decision to avoid the pitfalls caused by the misuse of information from standardized tests. Nationally normed standardized achievement tests do indeed have a purpose; they provide a means of comparing students' knowledge or skills to those of students nationally. But as a single measure, they are not in and of themselves enough to gauge the quality of education. According to James Popham, there are three primary reasons that standardized achievement tests should not be used as a single measurement of educational quality.2 The first reason is that norm- referenced standardized tests do not match what is taught in the local curriculum. In fact, a study conducted by the Buros Center for Testing at the University of Nebraska in 1998 discovered that the five primary standardized achievement tests match only 35% to 40% of the Nebraska state standards. It would make no sense to use one of these instruments to measure the effectiveness of student learning in Nebraska's schools when the test items reflect only some of the state's content standards. Second, because the purpose of the norm-referenced standardized achievement test is to differentiate between student and create a score variance, items on which most students perform well are generally not included on the tests. If most students do well on an item, that item will produce too little variance in test scores to be useful for comparisons. Ironically then, the better the job that teachers do in teaching important knowledge or skills, the less likely it is that such knowledge and skills will be tested! Third, the types of test items that appear on standardized achievement tests reflect more than what is taught in school; success on some items is a measure of a student's innate intellectual ability, while success on others represents the student's opportunity to learn out of school. …