State Academic Standards

Standards-based reform has been America's premier education strategy for more than a decade. Its many backers seek stronger school and student performance and more equal opportunities for children, especially disadvantaged youngsters. Every state in the union claims to be engaged in this challenging and high-minded quest. Under both Republicans and Democrats, Congress and the White House have recast federal policy to support standards-based reform. Business leaders, school officials, newspaper editors, and teacher unionists all pledge their allegiance to this ambitious approach to educational renewal.

Hopeful signs abound. Some states are boosting their scores, children are learning more, teachers are using surer methods of instruction. Education is attracting more high-level attention and political energy than ever before. Yet standards-based reform also faces genuine peril. Its enemies' ranks are growing. Its allies sometimes falter. Careless implementation has produced snafus. The future for standards-based reform is uncertain. But the price of failure would be high.

Background

Most people trace the roots of today's academic standards movement to the 1983 report A Nation at Risk. As dismay deepened over faltering student performance and the poor performance of American children on international assessments, attention began to shift from school inputs (for example, resources, programs, and facilities) as indicators of education quality to academic outcomes. As has been known since the 1966 report by James Coleman, Equality of Educational Opportunity, no sure link exists between what goes into a school and what comes out. By stirring the nation's awareness of the inadequacies of its K-12 education system, the National Commission on Excellence in Education began to press educators and policymakers to focus on results. The National Governors' Association gave this effort a boost in the mid-eighties. And the 1989 summit held in Charlottesville, Virginia, yielded America's first-ever set of national education goals, six targets to be met by the year 2000. The third of these called for students to "demonstrate competency in challenging subject matter, including English, mathematics, science, history and geography." Framing so broad a goal, however, turned out to be the easy part. What, exactly, were "competency" and "challenging subject matter"? Who was to decide? What would be the measures of performance? These questions turned out to be far harder to answer.

Even before Charlottesville, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) had embarked on standard setting in its field. Post-Charlottesville, others joined this effort, including the National Science Teachers Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Council for the Social Studies, the National History Standards Project, the Geography Standards Education Project, the New Standards Project, and more.

The national efforts yielded mixed reviews. Some provoked intense controversy. The national history standards proved to be a political lightning rod. In English, the national standards project was defunded in 1994 by the U.S. Department of Education because the draft produced by the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association was so weak. The NCTM math standards are probably the best known of these efforts, but even they caused dissension as critics referred to them as "fuzzy math" and "rain forest math." (They have recently been revised.)

Some disciplines were riven by disputes over how and what students should be taught. In English, proponents of phonics instruction and whole language battled about how children learn to read. In the higher grades, educators debated whether students should be exposed to the Western literary canon. In math, they quarreled over whether classrooms should focus on basic skills or real-world problems (that pupils can solve with a calculator).

As the national efforts stumbled, individual states largely had to set their own standards. In 1994 Congress passed Goals 2000 legislation, which provided federal funds to assist them with this process. Congress also refashioned the Title I program for disadvantaged students to link it with the...