Amazon.com description: Product Description: Since the term "standard" met the term "movement" well over a decade ago, the phrase "what students should know and be able to do" has increasingly come to determine classroom practice. Now, fixed, absolute end-point measures dictate what we know about our students-grade level by grade level, subject area by subject area, school by school. Worse, our students have been backed into marginal, nonparticipatory roles in their own education: their voices no longer heard; their capacity to assess their knowledge no longer recognized.

The Portfolio Standard provides an antidote to our current national mania for measuring, proposing instead that today's standard setters learn from the students they are so anxious to assess. Without our students' active participation in reflecting on their own learning, the authors argue, we are left with static, outdated, arbitrary notions of "what [our] students should know and be able to do." Without such active partnerships, our roles as teachers wither. This book, by contrast, offers thoughts, projects, and first-hand accounts of portfolio keeping in the voices of the keepers themselves.