Recent reform initiatives, especially the No Child Left Behind Act, tend to rely on a variety of highly debatable assumptions that fail to reflect the diversity of today's classrooms and also place pressure on educators in a manner we characterize as accountability by assumption. Such reform initiatives have become so political, complex, and omnipresent in teachers' perspectives on professional practice that these educators are increasingly intimidated, frustrated, reactionary and reductionistic, and disauthentic in their instruction and assessment of English language learners (ELL). Accordingly, we argue that classroom assessment will become less criterion-referenced, authentic, and capable of measuring incremental gains among students who are ELL.