In 1988, when a Maine test failed to measure educational accountability in Vermont, portfolios constituted the bottom-up response to needed reform. In 1990, Kentucky's Educational Reform Act mandated assessment by performance-based tasks, including portfolios. Both states feature scoring criteria (rubrics) based on four performance levels and…

Academic multiculturalism, an emerging educational trend, is a one-dimensional approach that adds a list of admirable persons of color to the existing curriculum. Political multiculturalism opens the curriculum to analysis and reconstruction of historical power struggles, including the social conditions and inequitable power relations behind…