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This article explores past and current education testing frameworks as a pretext for constructing a policy platform with the efficacy to transform systems and structures that hinder opportunities and resist equitable practices. The rise of accountability in education public policy has brought about intended and unintended outcomes. As prescribed, it has facilitated a significant measure of uniform clarity regarding standards of learning and mechanisms for measuring teacher and leadership impacts on student outcomes. However, perverse incentives, such as persistent or widening group outcome achievement disparities, demonstrate the need for policy work that extends beyond the identification of expected performance to address the execution of deliverables. More recently, scholars have suggested the need to move from a standards-based reform agenda to a supports-based reform agenda. The policy exploration in this study articulates the presence of an expectation gap—a disconnection between accountability expectations and support availability, identifying and analyzing the components necessary to transform a system of public education, which prioritizes accountability for results to one that also emphasizes the implementation of sound processes, which align the support structures and practices necessary to achieve results.

<div class="bookreview">Edward E. Baptist, <em>The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism </em>(New York: Basic Books, 2014), 528 pages, $35, hardcover.</div>For an estimated hundreds of thousands of people, including some 60,000 workers who had served notice to their bosses, April 15, 2015, was strike day&mdash;reportedly the largest mobilization of low-wage workers since May Day of 1886, when a half million workers and their families (10 percent of the population at the time) struck for the eight-hour work day. Hundreds of us from here in Tennessee joined fast food workers, adjuncts, and home and child-care workers in the morning for strike actions, and many of us boarded buses to St. Louis and Ferguson, Missouri, for a Black Lives Matter protest that brought together strikers and supporters from all across the region. It was an intense and exact showcase of the irrevocable knot of violent and permanent racism in this country, and its broadening (and racialized) wealth and income gap and the deepening, permanent poverty of working-class life.&hellip; There is no legitimate history of this nation's past and present that can deny the twin realities of extreme economic exploitation of people of color, especially African Americans, and the incredible violence perpetrated against them. Edward Baptist's <em>The Half Has Never Been Told</em> draws these two realities together in his contribution to the new set of histories of U.S. capitalism, slavery, and cotton, which include Sven Beckert's <em>Empire of Cotton</em> and Walter Johnson's <em>River of Dark Dreams</em>.<p class="mrlink"><p class="mrpurchaselink"><a href="http://monthlyreview.org/index/volume-67-number-6" title="Vol. 67, No. 6: November 2015" target="_self">Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the <em>Monthly Review</em> website.</a></p>

OBJECTIVE: To highlight the emerging ethos of cultural rigour in the use of critical appraisal tools in research involving First Nations peoples. METHODS: Critical reflection on recent systematic review experience. RESULTS: The concept of cultural rigour is notably undefined in peer-reviewed journal articles but is evident in the development of critical appraisal tools developed by First Nations peoples. CONCLUSIONS: Conventional critical appraisal tools for assessing study quality are built on a limited view of health that excludes the cultural knowledge of First Nations peoples. Cultural rigour is an emerging field of activity that epitomises First Nations peoples' diverse cultural knowledge through community participation in all aspects of research. Implications for public health: Critical appraisal tools developed by First Nations peoples are available to researchers and direct attention to the social, cultural, political and human rights basis of health research.