Over the past decade, the standards movement has come a long way, though the push for accountability has meant different things in different places. In this article, the author reports the effects of standards-based education in student achievement and the improvement of public schools. Though states had already begun setting clear and challenging guidelines for what students should know and developing tests and accountability systems closely aligned with those standards to prod schools to reach higher, the standards movement will still take far more than a decade to gauge its ultimate effects.