Comment

It is a long way from the statehouse to the schoolhouse, and not all of the distance can be measured in miles. Despite nearly two decades of efforts to make state education systems more coherent, these systems remain complex enterprises, shaped by deeply rooted and competing visions of schooling.³⁸ Further, the American tradition of local control of school governance--and the associated principle that those closest to children should shape the content and character of their education--provides a formidable counterweight to state-level education policy initiatives. Consequently, any effort to draw a causal link between changes in state policy and gains in student performance will face many hurdles.

Deep disagreements remain among policy analysts about the consequences of shifting educational decisionmaking away from local communities. Some researchers argue that an increase in state influence will negatively affect teacher practice and student learning.³⁹ They assert that state-developed content standards and other state-level policies affecting instruction are likely to reflect political compromises that reduce curriculum standards to the lowest common denominator. Low standards, they argue, will most negatively affect students in predominantly poor and minority schools. They contend that, in contrast, standards in wealthy school districts will be kept high by strong community pressure to offer college-preparatory curricula. In short, these researchers believe that state usurpation of the traditional local role in standards setting will have a markedly adverse effect on student achievement.

Meanwhile, other researchers argue that a coherent approach to education policymaking at the state level will obviate the creation of curricula shaped--at least in some school districts--by cultural stereotypes or low expectations.⁴⁰ Such locally created shallow curricula have historically impeded the upward mobility of those most dependent on a quality education, the poor and the disenfranchised. As Marshall S. Smith and Jennifer O'Day have written:

The potential advantage of a systemic strategy is that the policy coherence around a common set of challenging standards could insure that, at a minimum, teachers and schools receive consistent signals about what is important for them to teach and for students to learn. And these signals would be the same for all schools and students, thus countering trends toward a dual curriculum with high expectations for advantaged youth and much lower ones for everybody else.⁴¹

In her analysis of school reform and state policymaking, Susan Fuhrman argues that growing evidence shows that state policymakers can, despite substantial obstacles, enact rigorous curriculum standards and support them with coherent, coordinated policies.⁴² But she also argues that powerful incentives exist--such as the election cycle and the daunting complexity of educational problems--for legislators to focus their policymaking on the short term and on the direct, immediate interests of their constituents. This natural political process works against the creation of the long-term, stable educational policies on which successful school reform depends. School improvement is a slow process and is easily derailed by frequent changes in curriculum requirements and standards for performance.

Yet, whatever the arguments for or against setting curriculum policy at the state level, almost all states have moved in this direction. In 1998, forty states had statewide curriculum standards, forty-eight states assessed student learning, and thirty-six published annual "report cards" on individual schools.⁴³ Thus, it behooves scholars to conduct an earnest search for evidence regarding the effectiveness of systemic reform.

In their paper, David Grissmer and Ann Flanagan have taken an important step toward that goal. Using adjusted state-level National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) mathematics scores as their measuring rod, they estimate, state by state, the effects on student learning of education reform efforts begun in the mid-1980s. The adjustments they make to average NAEP scale scores address important deficiencies in student-level NAEP data. These deficiencies stem from the fact that students are poor judges of some demographic information collected by NAEP, including, for example...