This chapter is devoted to a story from a city whose districts have faced and continue to grapple with huge challenges in helping teachers enable students from diverse backgrounds to achieve at high levels. My story is about one of the largest school systems in the United States and how it weathered storms of assessment and accountability. It begins in the hot political climate of the late 1960s.

New York City communities were clamoring for more control over their local schools. Turmoil over local control of schools in East Harlem and Ocean-Hill Brownsville sparked legislative action that resulted in the creation of thirty-two community school districts, each reflecting the unique local needs, interests, and cultural concerns of the neighborhoods that comprised them. The once all-powerful Central City Board of Education was replaced with local control, giving the districts the power to implement curriculum as it reflected local culture, and make decisions about how schools were to deliver education to neighborhood students.

The Central Board remained with a much narrower set of responsibilities, primarily focused on policy and accountability. It was responsible for setting standards, providing guidelines and support for instruction, and providing the public with test scores to reflect how successful schools were in meeting the standards. As part of the 1969 Decentralization Law, the Board was to hire a chancellor, whose responsibilities included monitoring achievement of schools in the newly created community school districts. The law required the publication of school rank by reading achievement.

Although prior city-wide testing existed, this requirement gave birth to the high-stakes city-wide testing program. Its primary mandate was reading achievement. The mathematics community advocated for city-wide assessment of math ematics also, and mathematics was added to the city-wide testing program. As it evolved, great controversy ensued about what grades and types of students were to be included, and the instructional implications of a common testing program without a common curriculum.

Later, the state testing program was implemented at grades 3, 6, 8, and high school. Its primary mandate was to assure minimal competency by the time students were ready to graduate. At high school, certain students also took a more challenging Regents examination, reflecting what has been characterized as a bifurcated system, with different academic curricula and assessments being applied to students in different tracks.