1. Replace the ABCs with a more comprehensive model of accountability that includes performance-based assessments of students in a diverse range of subjects including art, physical education, and other currently non-evaluated subjects. Assessments should be age-appropriate, culturally unbiased, and content-related.
2. Include other indices of a school's success in an accountability model, such as school safety, parents' and students' satisfaction with school services, and community involvement.
3. Have in place a plan for evaluation of the accountability model before it is implemented.
4. Provide regular monitoring of students' progress and give feedback to students and parents throughout the grading periods and the year.
5. Develop remediation practices that do not stigmatize students. Minimize tracking, particularly in the early grades. Limit the use of retention as a remediation strategy.
6. Address the achievement gap among students of different races and social classes. Reward schools that successfully educate students of all races and economic circumstances.
7. Provide incentives for teachers to work at low wealth and low performing schools.
8. Equalize funding of schools so that all students have access to the latest technology, text books, and a safe and comfortable physical environment.
9. Change the SBE leadership so that a career educator rather than a business lobbyist directs education policy.
10. Involve teachers, parents, and community leaders in educational decisions and policies. Create community outreach committees in every school to provide input and get information out into the community about educational policies.

The testing program in Vermont provides educationally useful information about students, schools, and districts without the pressures and gamesmanship associated with high stakes assessment. North Carolina can follow its example and develop an assessment program that benefits students by evaluating multiple intelligences through the application of knowledge and problem-solving - skills that students will increasingly need to be successful in higher education, the workplace, and society.

Ironically, if NC does not change its accountability model, it will bring about what it had hoped to avoid with the ABCs - the public will lose confidence in the state's public schools. People are already beginning to question whether the ABCs program is nothing more than a numbers game. Teachers and administrators can place students in remedial classes so they won't bring the school's score down. DPI can continue to make statistical adjustments to the formulas. Every year, there will always be 15 schools that are classified as failures and only so many that are exemplars. And what do all these numbers and designations mean?

We cannot know from the ABCs lingo whether an " exemplary" school educates all of its students well or just some of them - typically the white, middle class ones. We don't know if a school has numerous incidences of violence in a given year. We don't know whether the roof leaks, the plumbing backs up, or if the heating system works properly in the school. We don't know if the school has enough textbooks for each student, what the average class size is, or what the teacher turnover rate is. And most of all, we don't know if students are developing the critical and creative thinking skills they will need in the future.

The SBE and DPI developed the ABCs to bolster public confidence in the state's schools, but the way that state officials have hastily implemented the ABCs without a systematic plan for its evaluation casts doubt on how much confidence we should have in the agency that oversees public education in this state. Right now, education policy is decided in the halls of the General Assembly amidst the money and powerful lobbyists of business interests while children sit in makeshift, mobile classrooms and teachers work 12-hour days with ever increasing pressure to take on more responsibilities and tasks. Corporate lobbyists, who are accountable first and foremost to industry executives and whose interests include protecting loopholes that drain the state coffers of millions of dollars each year, should not direct education policy. People who have dedicated their careers to education have the commitment to children's interests and the experience to direct the future of education in this state. The public would have more confidence in policy created by long-time educators rather than politicians and business lobbyists.

After their failure to be accountable to NC's schoolchildren and their parents, officials from the SBE and DPI now have an opportunity to restore their accountability by making significant changes in how they assess teacher and student performance. They also have a chance to change how educational decisions are made and who makes them: educators who have spent years in the classroom, or politicians and lobbyists. State bureaucrats from the SBE and DPI are not the only ones who have a duty to provide children in NC with a quality education and a positive learning environment. Ultimately, elected officials have an obligation to constituents and taxpayers to develop sound educational policy. It is time that the public held them accountable to do so.