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DC think tank Education Sector just released an important new white paper on "Measuring Skills for the 21st Century."  Here are some major points that grabbed my attention:

• Students should learn basic and advanced skills at the same time.  Low-performing students who learn basic skills at the expense of more advanced thinking skills will master neither.
• There are promising new strategies for assessing advanced 21st-century skills.  Tests like the College Work and Readiness Assessment and the River City Project offer compelling models for 21st-century assessment.
• Assessing 21st-century skills can be very expensive.  Unlike bubble tests, these broader tests can be difficult and time-consuming to score.
• As budgets grow tighter, state tests are relying more heavily on bubble tests of low-level skills.  Even before the financial crisis hit, states began scrubbing expensive open-ended questions from their assessments. That process is bound to accelerate.

Even in lean times, we should invest far more energy and resources in excellent assessment.  Lousy standardized tests have become the Achilles heel of current accountability systems.