This article discusses the potential benefits and detriments of high-stakes assessment, the characteristics of useful assessments for students with disabilities and the potential impact of high-stakes assessment on students with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD). We suggest that the benefits of high-stakes assessment (or, more appropriately, test-linked standards) are most likely to be found in schools that are already attaining acceptable results relative to the standards. In schools serving students who are less privileged, test-linked standards are more likely to be associated with detrimental effects. We suggest that these tests are unlikely to be useful to teachers of students with EBD because they differ dramatically from assessment procedures that have been validated for students with disabilities. Test-linked standards, we conclude, are unlikely to yield benefit to students with EBD and quite likely to expose them to increased risk by focusing educational practice only on a narrowly defined and poorly evaluated set of outcomes.
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