National Education Standards: Current Movement Significant questions have been raised recently about whether state standards, which form the backbone of NCLB accountability systems, are rigorous and aligned with what students need to know to be ready for college and the workplace. Differences in the quality and rigor of states' tests and standards have fueled suggestions that some states have set their expectations low to avoid sanctions under the NCLB. Some leading policy experts have called for the development of national standards as an effective way to remedy differences in states' expectations. Recently, proposals have suggested that states align their standards with those of top-performing countries around the world as a means of ensuring that students in the United States can compete with their peers around the globe. Issues
Concerns over high-school graduation rates and workplace demands have led to a focus on “readiness standards” particularly in math and language arts to prepare students for lifelong learning outside of school. This begs this question of what type of educational “readiness standards” would prepare students to learn while they are still in school.
New Reports on National Standards In December, the National Governor’s Association (NGA), the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), and Achieve released a report “Benchmarking for Success: Ensuring U.S, Students Receive a World Class Education” which urges states to start pursuing the following agenda of common standards:
Action 1: Upgrade state standards by adopting a common core of internationally benchmarked standards in math and language arts for grades K-12 to ensure that students are equipped with the necessary knowledge and skills to be globally competitive. Action 2: Leverage states’ collective influence to ensure that textbooks, digital media, curricula, and assessments are aligned to internationally benchmarked standards and draw on lessons from high performing nations and states. Action 3: Revise state policies for recruiting, preparing, developing, and supporting teachers and school leaders to reflect the human capital practices of top-performing nations and states around the world. Action 4: Hold schools and systems accountable through monitoring, interventions, and support to ensure consistently high performance, drawing upon international best practices. Action 5: Measure state-level education performance globally by examining student achievement and attainment in an international context to ensure that, over time, students are receiving the education they need to compete in the 21st century economy. Responses of Other Groups In a position statement released last month, the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP) calls on Congress to appoint an independent panel of researchers, educators, and others to come up with a set of common guidelines for what students should know and be able to do in the two subjects at each grade level. The standards, and accompanying assessments, should replace punitive provisions in the federal law, the NASSP says. They go on to recommend that a plan for adopting national academic standards and assessments in reading and mathematics, as well as for helping states and districts implement them, should be included in the reauthorization of NCLB. The National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), an outspoken critic of NCLB, has rejected the idea of common standards and is calling for more flexibility for states. The legislators' fear is that the Congress or the Education Department would force states to adopt common definitions of academic content, even if they are developed intending to be voluntary. Many teachers have denounced national standards because they fear we will lose even more of our autonomy in making instructional decisions, The American federation of Teachers(AFT) says clear standards would help ensure that teachers are effectively trained, objectively judged and provided with proven teaching tools and curriculums. The union argues that a national-standards approach would help students while still allowing teachers to be creative. Advocates for common standards agree on one thing: the federal government should not define the content of such standards but should have brief written statements of the skills and knowledge children should attain at each grade level for each subject area. The federal government should either encourage or require states to base their schools’ curricula on these standards. Colleges of Education, in turn, would train would-be teachers in the standards.
Federal Support The President's stimulus package includes a $4.35 billion "Race to the Top" education fund that the Secretary of Education can use to give incentives to states that make "dramatic progress" in meeting goals that include improving standards. The Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, has said he wants the federal government to be "a catalyst" for the development of national standards, and wants to support the NGA and other groups working to set them. "If we accomplish one thing in the coming years, it should be to eliminate the extreme variation in standards across America," he says. "I know that talking about standards can make people nervous, but the notion that we have 50 different goalposts is absolutely ridiculous." Secretary Duncan has indicated that he will support voluntary efforts to write national standards and to prod states to adopt them. This process should involve advisory boards that represent employers, college admissions officers, military recruiters, teachers, education scholars and parents. It should also be ongoing, because the standards will have to evolve as the needs of the workplace and global economy do. In states that shy away from holding their schools accountable to these standards, parents and business leaders should hold the elected leaders accountable.
Brief History of Standards Movement Standards-based reform has been debated at least since the nation's governors met with President George H. W. Bush in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1989 to set national education goals. Its underpinnings go back farther, however, to the Coleman Report in 1966 and A Nation at Risk in 1983. The next big steps in this evolution came in 1994 when Congress passed the Goals 2000 Act and the Improving America's Schools Act, which in combination put considerable federal oomph and money behind standards-based reform. Although none of the components of America 2000 was enacted into law and awarded funds to create state standards and assessments. President Clinton proposed voluntary national tests in 4th grade reading and 8th grade mathematics, a promising idea that did not win congressional authorization. In January 2002, NCLB was enacted with overwhelming bipartisan support. The law required the states, in exchange for federal funding, to test all children in grades 3-8 in reading and mathematics; to disaggregate the results by race, ethnicity, gender, English-language proficiency, socioeconomic status, and disability; and to demonstrate that students in every category were advancing toward proficiency. Schools that did not meet their goals would have to offer supplementary tutoring and/or a choice of other public schools. This history is relevant to today’s consideration of national education standards because it would appear that the same impediments to enacting national standards that existed then exist now. First, there is the thirty-five year old federal law (20 U.SC. 1232(a)) that declares “No provision of any applicable program shall be construed to authorize any department, agency, officer, or employee of the United States to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, program of instruction, administration, or personnel of any educational institution, school, or school system, or over the selection of library resources, textbooks, or other printed or published instructional materials by any educational institution or school system.”
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