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HE DECEMBER 2000 Kappan featured a very important contribution to the current discourse on standards-based school reform. "Thinking Carefully About Equity and Accountability," by James Scheurich, Linda Skrla, and Joseph Johnson, invited readers to take part in a dialogue on these issues. 1 At the heart of our disagreement with Scheurich and his colleagues is the subject of the standardsbased school reform movement, which has come to dominate most discussions in education today and which has spawned a great deal of scholarly literature, conferences, symposia, and even litigation. We wish to focus here on several misconceptions, omissions, and flaws in the argument put forth by Scheurich and his colleagues. We have organized our response around the following points: the common ground we share, the flaws in their "historic possibilities" thesis, their misconception of accountability as a dichotomy, and our vision of equity and accountability.

This article draws primarily from a 3-year qualitative case study to offer evidence that high-stakes testing is one among a number of alienating features of schooling. The focus is on low-achieving Mexican-origin students attending a segregated, urban high school located in Houston, Texas. The data show that the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills test often discourages regulartrack, Mexican American and Mexican immigrant students from completing high school or considering a college education. The required, English-only nature of the exit test is also highlighted as a key reason why limited-English-proficient, primarily Mexican immigrant, students fail to meet the passing requirement at high rates. High-stakes testing is characterized herein as embedded within a larger logic that systematically negates Mexican youths’ culture and language.

This study examines the relation of liberal attitudes toward women to academic achievement among 97 seventh-and eighth-grade Mexican-origin adolescents attending two Houston inner-city Catholic schools. These liberal attitudes refer to views regarding the rights and roles of women in society. Results show that liberal attitudes toward women are significantly related to Mexican-originfemales'academic achievement, as measured by their grades in mathematics and language arts. This association suggests thatfemales modify their achievement as a result of theirperceptions of compatibility between liberal attitudes and academic success or socioeconomic mobility. Moreover, to the degree that such attitudes reflect the social and cultural resources of educational institutions, they may correspond implicitly to cultural capital.