Editors' introduction: Special issue on standards-based reforms and accountabilty

In this special issue of Review of Educational Research, we present a collection of articles that cohere around the common theme of standards-based reform and accountability. The research suggests that all five of these policy attributes contribute to implementation and that, in addition, each is related to particular aspects of the process: specificity to implementation fidelity, power to immediate implementation effects, and authority, consistency, and stability to long-lasting change. The authors point out that the assumptions on which mentoring programs are based often do not focus on standards and that the prevailing mentoring practices are consistent with those assumptions rather than with the assumptions behind standards-based teaching.