America’s business community has a huge stake in the success of our students. As long-time partners to the US Chamber of Commerce foundation, we provide ongoing thought partnership and strategic counsel to the K-12 education team and contribute to the organization’s well-known Business Leads Fellowship Program, which trains business leaders to be education champions in their communities. The program currently includes over 400 current participants and alumni who serve as powerful advocates for education in their communities.

Beginning in 2022 and ending in 2023, the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation embarked on an ambitious effort to imagine the future of how we use assessments and hold our education system accountable.

The effort contributed to the field in several ways:

• A Working Group, which included thought leaders with diverse perspectives informed by decades of experience in our education system. The Working Group spent time hearing from other experts in the field and wrestling with tradeoffs inherent in assessment and accountability policy and practice.
• A report, authored by Dr. Dan Goldhaber and Dr. Michael DeArmond, revealed what we know and do not know about the last 20 years of education reform.
• A Design Challenge, which awarded six winners with innovative thinking around how we improve public school accountability.

In addition, state, regional, and local chambers of commerce are important partners to the public education systems in their states and communities. For this reason, the Chamber Foundation also created a School Board Discussion Guide to help enable those productive conversations.