Introduction

The 2000 conference of the Brown Center on Education Policy of the Brookings Institution was devoted to discussion of academic standards in the United States. Participants represented a wide variety of views, some strongly supportive of standard setting, others very critical, and many at different points on the spectrum in between. Nonetheless, all recognized that the United States has embarked on a historically unprecedented path of public policy during approximately the last two decades of the twentieth century. The nation, so long entrenched in patterns of localism and so long averse to external education standards, was in the midst of multiple efforts to establish academic standards and the means for assessing whether students had met them. Almost every aspect of education--including teacher education, testing of students and teachers, professional development, textbooks, preschool instruction, and financing of schools--seemed likely to be affected by the new emphasis on standards.

How did the search for academic standards became a national goal, carried out in almost all fifty states at the same time? One important impetus was the famous report A Nation at Risk, published in 1983 by the U.S. Department of Education's National Commission on Excellence in Education. The commission warned in fiery rhetoric that the nation's future well-being was threatened by a "rising tide of mediocrity." Among the evidence offered for this judgment was the relatively poor performance of American students on various international assessments. After A Nation at Risk, the public and elected officials of both major political parties agreed that expectations were far too low and that American students were not learning nearly enough to prepare for college or for the demands of work in a rapidly advancing economy. In 1989 President George Bush convened the nation's governors in an education summit, where they agreed to set national goals for the year 2000. Two of the six goals pledged higher performance in the key academic subjects taught in school. In 1991 and 1992 the Bush administration commissioned the development of voluntary national standards, an ambitious and unprecedented undertaking that was fraught with peril because of a lack of planning, time, and experience.

The Clinton administration relied not on voluntary national standards, which had quickly become mired in controversy, but on state action. Its signature education legislation, called Goals 2000, provided funds for states to draft their own standards and tests. By 1996, nearly every state was engaged in this exercise and was trying to figure out how to align tests to standards, whether to produce test results for schools or students or both, how to use test scores, and how to add resources to the system wisely.

Three other factors contributed to the nation's seemingly sudden turn to academic standards. First and perhaps of primary importance, concern about academic achievement was truly bipartisan, thus a great deal of partisan wrangling was avoided. Second, periodic opinion surveys found that the public enthusiastically supported standards and testing. Parents, citizens, teachers, and even students agreed by overwhelming margins that the public schools should put greater emphasis on basic academic subjects. The public wanted higher academic standards and greater specificity about what children were expected to learn. It also wanted students to pass tests to show that they had reached standards. In survey after survey, public opinion concurred that students should not graduate from high school until they had demonstrated their mastery of writing and speaking English.

Third, the push for higher standards was advanced by regular reporting on student performance by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). NAEP is the federal testing program of various academic subjects, based on national samples of students. It has been in operation since 1969 and has been supervised since 1990 by the bipartisan National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB). Until 1991, NAEP reports described what students knew and could do on a scale that was not easily comprehended by the public. After 1991, the NAGB adopted achievement levels, which were standards describing what students should know and be able to do. It established...