In American education, the scars of the “accountability wars” still run deep. More than two decades after the federal No Child Left Behind Act established punitive, high-profile accountability requirements for America’s K–12 schools, states and districts remain wary of debates over testing, student performance, and school improvement. This understandable backlash has pushed many states toward the other extreme: local control without meaningful oversight, where responsibility has too often dissolved into complacency. Neither approach has delivered what students deserve. And the stakes are only getting higher. Schools today face challenges that no one has a ready blueprint to solve: the lingering effects of the pandemic on student learning, declining enrollment, eroding trust in public institutions, and deep political discord that too often turns classrooms into battlegrounds. Add to that the disruptive force of artificial intelligence and the urgent need to reimagine high school for a changing economy, and it’s clear that the old approaches to accountability aren’t up to the task. It’s time for a truce—a forward-looking approach that moves us past old extremes.