In Kentucky, high stakes assessment of schools and school districts resulting from the state's educational reform initiative raises the issue of fairness. Should educational officials and teachers be held accountable for student performance despite vast differences in the socioeconomic conditions of the surrounding communities when extensive research shows community context affects student performance to a substantial degree? In this paper, a method is presented for assessing educational performance that corrects for community contextual factors. The issues of high stakes accountability and effective schools research are also discussed. The method relies on spatial analysis, a technique developed by geographers that entails mapping the standardized residuals from a regression analysis to find county school districts in which student performance is greater than expected, and less than expected, net of community context. Use of this procedure, it is argued, lessens possible bias in the Kentucky assessment results and helps allay concerns over unfairness in the state's accountability system. The procedure can be modified for a school-to-school analysis, although the mapping task would be more exacting in its smaller scale. Analysis of such spatial maps will allow educators to locate pockets of excellence and begin action research to identify particularly effective practices. An appendix discusses community level socioeconomic variables. (Contains 1 figure, 1 table, and 39 references.) (Author/SLD)