Four Key Assessment and Accountability Trends Education Leaders Should Monitor

May 14, 2025

By Bryan Hemberg, Mariann Lemke, and Sarah Quesen

Today’s educational environment demands that leaders navigate a perfect storm of challenges: wielding data effectively while keeping students at the center, implementing emerging technologies ethically, and building assessment systems that drive genuine improvement rather than mere compliance. The ground beneath our feet is shifting rapidly, with artificial intelligence (AI), literacy science, data communication practices, and accountability frameworks all evolving simultaneously.

In this blog post, we spotlight four critical areas transforming education measurement and improvement systems.

Navigating AI in Education: A Human-Centered Approach

The rapid rise of AI in education presents both opportunity and risk. While AI tools offer new possibilities for personalized learning, assessment, and operations, their adoption must center on human values: fairness, privacy, and pedagogy.

The U.S. Department of Education’s AI and the Future of Teaching and Learning report (2023) calls for a “human-centered approach” and provides a comprehensive toolkit for safe, ethical, and fair implementation (U.S. DOE, 2023 ). It emphasizes that responsible adoption “requires careful planning, teamwork, and risk management.”

WestEd echoes this framing in its guidance for state education agencies, outlining 10 emerging considerations for K–12 AI policy—including capacity building, oversight, and alignment with educational goals. A companion piece highlights the importance of designing AI systems that elevate—not replace—the human elements of learning.

The National Association of State Boards of Education (NASBE) also offers five key principles: establish leadership, issue guidance, provide professional development, promote AI literacy, and support innovation. As of early 2025, more than 25 states have released official guidance on AI use in schools (Kleiman & Gallagher, 2024).

Key Challenges for Educators

Bias, privacy, and pedagogy remain central concerns for incorporating AI into teaching and learning. AI tools have misclassified students or penalized nonstandard dialects in automated scoring.

Privacy issues arise as systems require continuous data collection, raising concerns about surveillance and compliance with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA).

Pedagogically, while AI can support instruction, it may also encourage overreliance, reducing opportunities for student reasoning and critical thinking.

Actionable Steps for Education Leaders

1. Establish governance with expertise in ethics and privacy.
2. Integrate AI literacy into student curricula and teacher professional learning.
3. Evaluate regularly for bias, effectiveness, and security.
4. Prioritize fairness so AI tools broaden—not restrict—access and opportunity.
5. Maintain human oversight so that educators remain central to teaching and decision-making.

By applying these strategies, educational leaders can implement AI in ways that support innovation while protecting students, educators, and the relationships that define meaningful learning.

Building a Coherent Early‑Literacy System

Efforts to enhance early-grade literacy have gained significant momentum. Progress will accelerate when educators work within integrated and supportive systems. Core curricula, universal screeners, diagnostic assessments, and intervention programs must target the same skills in consistent ways and be supported by coherent professional learning if we are to truly impact student learning.

Key Challenges for Educators

When states, districts, or schools review and choose materials to support early-literacy instruction, they often carry out those processes separately or at different times. States may also approve many products so that schools and districts have options from which they can choose.

Often, in making their choices, states and districts rely on rubrics that judge the technical quality of materials. That’s not wrong; it’s just limiting. Without taking into account how instructional supports will operate in connection with other materials and activities, we run the risk of incoherence.

One state’s approved lists, for example, include 26 core programs, 19 foundational skills resources, 89 interventions, and 16 diagnostics. This results in the potential for districts and schools to create more than 700,000 distinct “bundles” of materials, each of which may define skills like phonological awareness differently. A teacher could teach one version, screen for another, and intervene with a third, potentially leading to inconsistent outcomes and also creating heavy burdens for planning and support.

Actionable Steps for Education Leaders

1. Map content, skills, and instructional approaches across all materials to ensure alignment and understand how they can (or cannot) work together.
2. Evaluate how materials will be implemented in classrooms, considering time needed to use them, the data they generate, and the professional development needed to support them.
3. Request clear guidance from publishers and reviewers on integrating materials in practice.

When teachers combine literacy instructional tools that work in concert, they create a powerful system that accelerates reading growth for all students. By auditing existing materials, identifying coherence gaps, and developing implementation plans, we can transform fragmented resources into an integrated system for sustainable literacy improvement.

Promoting Assessment Literacy and Clear Communication of Assessment Data

The proliferation of assessments has created an urgent need for assessment literacy among educators, students, and families. Understanding how to interpret and communicate assessment results is crucial for making informed decisions to improve student outcomes. To effectively use assessment data, both the skills to understand assessment purpose and design and the ability to clearly communicate results in ways that lead to meaningful action are needed.

Modern assessment systems now incorporate multiple measures beyond traditional tests, creating both opportunities and challenges. As systems become more complex, clear communication and interpretation of results become increasingly critical.

Key Challenges for Education Leaders

Despite the essential link between instruction and assessment, many teachers, students, families, and administrators may not understand the assessments being used, their purposes, or their appropriate applications. Many aren’t prepared to use the results effectively to improve student learning and achievement.

Schools face mounting pressure to translate complex assessment data into meaningful action. No single test can provide a complete picture of what students know, and the information from tests, together with other data such as assignments or other student work, is critical for making accurate instructional decisions.

Understanding student learning and the efficacy of our educational programs and policies is critical to transforming student outcomes, as are intentional data practices that prioritize authentic pictures of learning and center student experiences.

Actionable Steps for Education Leaders

1. Build assessment literacy to choose and create high-quality assessment tools and strategies and to understand their data.
2. Gain confidence in using assessment data for differentiated, standards-based instruction.
3. Align data with their purpose by ensuring they address challenges, guide responses, and track progress.
4. Collaborate with educators, students, and families to use data effectively and better support student growth.
5. Keep students at the center by focusing on their experiences and authentic learning contexts.

Assessment literacy helps ensure that data serve students rather than defining them. When educators develop assessment literacy, they transform assessment from a measurement tool into a catalyst for learning and build the communication skills needed to share results in ways that empower students, families, and colleagues to take informed action.

Balancing Rigor and Local Responsiveness in Accountability

As the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) approaches its decade milestone, policymakers face a critical juncture in accountability system design. The “natural experiment” created by various state implementations has generated valuable evidence about which approaches balance rigorous standards with responsiveness to local needs.

State education agencies have interpreted federal flexibility differently—some embracing explicit options while others explore implicit opportunities where the law remains silent (WestEd, 2023). This varied implementation now provides policymakers with concrete examples of accountability systems that maintain high expectations while honoring community contexts and priorities.

The Challenge for Leaders and Policymakers

System redesign requires navigating competing demands: maintaining sufficient rigor to drive improvement while creating frameworks flexible enough to address unique local circumstances. Policymakers must simultaneously identify quality measures that remain meaningful across diverse contexts and reconcile federal requirements with state-specific priorities.

They struggle with determining the appropriate division of authority between state and local agencies while establishing evidence-based practices without one-size-fits-all approaches. Ensuring systems can evolve without losing coherence presents an ongoing challenge.

States without articulated principles face additional difficulties: inconsistent decision-making when evaluating system changes, challenges defending design choices when questioned, and maintenance o f system coherence through leadership transitions (WestEd, 2024).

When principles remain implicit or unarticulated, accountability systems risk becoming disconnected collections of indicators rather than unified frameworks that translate educational values into action.

Actionable Insights for Leaders and Policymakers

1. Develop Clear Guiding Principles: Set transparent principles to guide decision-making and ensure contextual quality across varied contexts.
2. Consider Layered Accountability: Use dual frameworks to meet both local and federal goals through complementary systems.
3. Distribute Responsibility Strategically: Create appropriate oversight and support responsibilities between state and local authorities, with clear parameters around local flexibility.
4. Create Cross-State Learning Networks: Enable states to compare approaches and adopt practices that balance rigor with responsiveness.
5. Include Adaptation Mechanisms: Design accountability systems with formal processes to evolve based on implementation feedback, keeping them rigorous and relevant.

The evolving state accountability systems under ESSA demonstrate that balancing consistent standards with contextual responsiveness is achievable through thoughtful system design that values both excellence and adaptation.

In conclusion, four critical factors shape effective assessment and accountability systems today: human-centered AI implementation, coherent literacy assessment frameworks, widespread assessment literacy, and balanced accountability approaches. These elements form an interconnected ecosystem in which weakness in one area undermines the entire structure.

Education leaders must embrace systems thinking: seeing how instructional materials connect to assessments, how data flow into decision-making, and how accountability measures influence classroom practices. When these components work in harmony, they create powerful opportunities to enhance student learning.

How WestEd Can Help

At WestEd, we’re committed to helping education leaders navigate these challenges with evidence-based approaches that balance rigor with practical implementation.

Contact us today to discuss how WestEd can support your journey toward more effective, equitable, and coherent assessment and accountability systems that drive meaningful improvements in teaching and learning.

Be sure to check out these services and resources:

• Assessment System Design: Visit our Center for Standards, Assessment, and Accountability (CSAA)
• AI Implementation Support: Access our latest tools and frameworks for responsible AI adoption
• Literacy Assessment Alignment: Schedule a consultation with our literacy specialists to audit your current system for coherence between instruction, assessment, and intervention
• Assessment Literacy Training: Our professional development workshops are designed to build capacity for data interpretation and communication
• Accountability Framework Design: Partner with our policy experts to develop guiding principles that will strengthen your accountability systems