Perie (National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment) offers a text for policy makers and administrators that outlines challenges related to the use of alternate assessment based on modified achievement standards (AA-MAS) for lower achieving students with disabilities. In the nine chapters, education and testing specialists from the US go over design and development issues and the theory behind each issue, existing research, and best practices in identifying and assessing these students. They address providing guidelines for writing standards-based individualized education plans and monitoring the implementation of those guidelines, designing an assessment based on grade-level content standards, determining the relationship between assessments, writing modified achievement-level descriptors, understanding student learning characteristics, design for reading and math content, examining validity, determining comparability to general assessments, and understanding how the assessment will be used in a state accountability system. Annotation ©2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)