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Brookings Papers on Education Policy 2001 (2001) 9-74



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Incentives and Equity under Standards-Based Reform

Julian R. Betts and Robert M. Costrell

[Comment by Herbert J. Walberg]
[Comment by Meredith Phillips and Tiffani Chin]
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Standards-based reform is a strategy that includes specifying what is to be learned, devising tests to measure learning, and establishing consequences of performance for students and schools (for example, setting cut scores for grade promotion and high school graduation). The goal of this strategy is to raise student performance across the spectrum, especially for students from those schools, often heavily minority, where expectations are chronically low. The point is to alter incentives and change the behavior of students, teachers, administrators, and parents in a way that improves learning.

Popular support remains strong for standards-based reform, according to national polling data as well as local data in the states implementing this strategy. 1 For example, a recent poll in Massachusetts, which is implementing one of the more rigorous sets of exams (effective for the class of 2003), indicates that 70 percent of the general population favors graduation exams. Support is slightly more emphatic from urban than suburban respondents, and somewhat broader (75 percent) from those with income under $25,000. When respondents are asked if they would still support the exams should 25 percent of students in their communities fail on the first try, support remains unchanged overall at 70 percent and rises to 81 percent among those with income under $25,000. 2

Nonetheless, vocal, if not yet necessarily wide, opposition has emerged in several states, in the run-up to full implementation of standards-based reforms. Objections fall into different categories. One source of discord concerns the content of what should be learned. The battles of the mid-1990s over national [End Page 9] content standards in history and English, and more recently in science and mathematics, have had their counterparts in the states. 3 Despite continuing conflicts, certain broad (if not universal) agreement can be obtained in basic content areas (at least mathematics and English). The focus here will not be on content disagreements, but on disputes over testing and cutoff scores. However, at least some of the more vocal opposition to testing is based (if not always explicitly so) on unresolved disagreements over content standards, because tests give force to the content standards.

Opposition to testing-with-consequences is based on a simple, fundamental fact of life: Almost any change creates winners and losers. For example, technological progress has always had its losers, from the hand-loom weavers to the buggy-makers to current-day bricks-and-mortar retailers, computer illiterates, and those of low cognitive skills. The technologically caused losses of those with low cognitive skills over the last two decades have driven much of the standards-based reform movement. So, too, may standards-based reform create losers (at least in the short run) in the attempt to create more winners from technological progress. The fact that there are losers, along with winners, is not, in itself, a compelling reason to roll back the standards any more than it would be a reason to try to halt technical progress (by, say, shutting down the U.S. Patent Office). Instead, the nature of the losses must be examined and an appropriate set of policies must be crafted to minimize them.

The most obvious potential losers are those who may not meet the standard, and who may not earn a high school diploma as a result. But this is only the beginning of the analysis. For example, whether the failure rate rises as a result of sorting or whether it also reflects adverse incentive effects makes a great deal of difference. The distinction is important both for evaluating the costs of increased standards and for focusing policies to mitigate costs. Similarly, distinguishing sorting and incentive effects among the winners from various points on the educational spectrum is important.

Standards generate a mix of sorting and incentive effects. How are incentives altered by standards-based reform...

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