September 2001
| Volume 59 | Number 1
Making Standards Work
Marge Scherer
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Matthew Gandal and Jennifer Vranek
Successful standards-based reform depends on how well educators plan and implement standards, assessment, and accountability policies. For three years, staff members of Achieve, Inc.—a nonprofit organizations created by the nation’s governors and business leaders to help states determine the difference between high quality and poor quality standards, assessment, and accountability policies—have worked with nearly half the U.S. states to examine their policies, compare them with the best examples from other states and nations, and offer suggestions for improvement. Several principles can help educators plan for the long term: standards have to be teachable; standards should be rigorous yet reasonable; tests should measure the standards; teachers need tools to help students meet standards; and students need time and support to meet the standards.
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Marge Scherer
Researcher and writer Robert J. Marzano looks backward and forward at the attempt to design and implement standards-based education in the United States. Although he applauds the positive impact the movement has had on setting priorities in education, he believes schools have yet to systematically enforce or implement standards. To implement standards more effectively, he advocates reducing the standards to one-third their current number, making the language of standards clearer and less redundant, and creating a standards-based grading system that would reduce the need for reliance on standardized tests. Indications show that standards are here to stay, he says, largely fueled by the public's demand for accountability and the greater access to comparative data on student and school achievement.
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Thomas R. Guskey
Now that standards are the norm in most schools, how do teachers grade and report on student work in accordance with standards? Educators will need to address five challenges in order to make standards-based reporting work:
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Move from norm-referenced to criterion-referenced standards;
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Differentiate the types of grading criteria;
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Clarify the purpose of reporting tools;
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Develop a standards-based reporting form or report card;
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Maintain consistency in reporting forms.
Although creating standards-based reporting forms takes a lot of work, these forms are valuable to parents, who can better understand how their children are progressing against the standards; to teachers, who can represent student achievement more accurately and completely; and to students, who can make better sense of where they are and how they can improve.
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Paul S. George
School leaders in Florida are responding energetically to the demands of the state's new high-stakes tests and accountability program, which assigns grades, from A to F, to each public school on the basis of students' scores on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT). The author's close look at 50 schools identified 10 strategies that school leaders, in varying degrees, use to raise student achievement scores: set urgent goals, engage school personnel, use school achievement data, strengthen professional development, align the curriculum, increase time for academics, choose instructional materials to support standards, build interdisciplinary teams, promote the test, and redefine school leadership. Although recent studies sponsored by the state indicate gains in students' test scores, especially in previously low-performing schools, some leaders are concerned that the definition of school success is too narrow and that the reforms are damaging to a developmentally appropriate education for their students. The author concludes that only the benefit of hindsight will inform educators on the effects of these accountability measures.
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James Bushman, Greg Goodman, Sharon Brown-Welty and Shelly Dorn
California is feeling the testing and standards crunch, but what are principals doing about it? A recent survey shows that principals are using the tests to individualize student learning, aligning the curriculum to standards, and helping teachers develop new methodologies with which to improve. In addition, they are making an effort to involve parents in the schools. All these efforts make one thing clear: With the help of data and state funding, principals are doing much to boost student achievement.
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Susan M. Drake
How can standards help integrate the curriculum? One 4th grade teacher in Ontario, Canada, discovered the answer when he implemented a unit on Medieval Times. Using a know, be, do learning bridge to guide the connections among subject areas, a three-person learning team created daily activities that corresponded to the standards and that culminated in a medieval fair. The team focused on science, social studies, language, and the arts, and used the standards to ensure that students learned content and research skills. Throughout the process, students had a voice in what and how they learned. By weaving together a variety of standards with innovation and planning, teachers can make the curriculum come alive for all their students.
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Paula Kluth and Diana Straut
Education standards receive much attention these days from political leaders, families, and educators. Many of them are concerned about what the standards movement means for the increasingly diverse student population of the United States. The authors explore the purpose and promise of standards and the necessity of both developing meaningful standards and meeting the needs of all students. Standards work best when they meet five conditions: they are developmental and flexible, not one-size-fits-all; they assess diverse competencies with a variety of assessment measures, not with high-stakes tests; they allow equitable access to meaningful content; they engage the entire school and community in implementing standards; and they are used as a compass for crafting public policy and rich instructional environments for all students. The authors hope that misunderstandings of standards and unrealistic expectations of standards will not detract from the benefits that standards can provide for all students.
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Deborah E. Burns and Jeanne H. Purcell
What strategies can teachers use to integrate complicated, wordy standards into their daily classroom activities? Five tools help with the process.
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The sentence diagram allows teachers to clarify and make sense of the standards language;
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A roll of the dice matches the six sides of a die to the six aspects of knowledge that teachers may emphasize within a standard;
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The mannequin compares the way we dress each morning to the way we need to "clothe" our standards;
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Twenty questions jump-starts student engagement by transforming a standard statement into 20 provocative questions for students; and
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The ladder enables teachers to differentiate the various rungs of student achievement.
All these tools help launch useful conversations and reflections on how standards can best serve student needs.
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Karen Hawley Miles
The focus on creating accountable, standards-based schools is pushing districts and schools to more clearly define their goals and priorities for student learning. No matter what school leaders and communities say is important, the way schools and districts use their dollars, organize their people, and structure their time dictates the results. If we hope to meet our seemingly unreachable goals, districts, and schools will have to define a few priorities for student performance, make choices about how to organize to meet them, and then move the dollars and people to match these commitments. To support schools in raising student performance, most districts will need to realign spending and staffing in at least five ways: restructure teaching salaries to attract and retain high quality academic teachers; redirect district staff and spending from compliance efforts toward providing integrated support and accountability; shift more resources to teaching literacy in grades K–3; invest strategically in professional development for teachers; and reduce spending on nonacademic teaching staff in secondary schools.
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John H. Bishop, Ferran Mañe and Michael Bishop
Contrary to the predictions of critics, studies show that standards-based reforms are raising the achievement levels of students, especially when the assessments are curriculum-based external exit examinations. The author reviews what all external assessments have in commonBincluding a fairer assessment of student achievement—and then explains how external exit examinations provide better measures of students' achievement and create better conditions for learning and teaching. He describes the success of students from countries outside of the United States on the TIMSS test and shows how education jurisdictions that use these tests also provide students with more instruction in math and science and a better educational environment. The author then reports on analyses he and colleagues have conducted on school and student accountability systems within the United States, comparing the effects of standards-based reforms on test score gains, test scores, and dropout rates. He concludes that students learn more and have lower dropout rates in states with strong school accountability systems. Students facing minimum competency test graduation requirements are less likely to graduate but are more likely to go to college and to get jobs that pay well. Curriculum-based external exit examination systems had the largest positive impacts on student achievement.
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Genét Simone
Education policymakers tend to focus on the big picture of school reform, often through the lens of students' standardized test scores. Although this viewpoint is important for school reform efforts, it often ignores the teachers who develop the kind of community where authentic learning takes place. Questions arise: How are teachers meeting the demands of standards? What does standards-based instruction look like? What are teachers doing to handle the pressure of a high-stakes test without teaching to it?
The author sketches a portrait of an effective teacher who manages to meet the demands of Standards while fostering a sense of community among her students. Judy Alexander teaches her 4th graders to become lifelong readers and writers as well as to meet state writing standards. To create a comfortable and trusting classroom atmosphere, Judy uses three strategies: the class meeting, read aloud-time, and assessment.
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Elizabeth A. Hebert
If students had been involved in setting standards for learning, the standards would look very different from the current documents. Children by nature recognize and acknowledge competencies in one another that have value in their social world. At Crow Island School in Winnetka, Illinois, elementary school educators use student portfolios to help them understand what students know and what they value in learning. As part of the portfolio process, they teach children to use conversation to reflect on self-selected evidence of their learning. Such conversations give students opportunities to practice self-assessment and to place their products and performances within a spectrum of evaluation. The student's own thinking as demonstrated in reflective conversations with peers, teachers, and parents is a powerful tool for measuring and appreciating how and what students learn.
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Dewitt Jones
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John H. Holloway
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Steven C. Schlozman
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Robert E. Slavin
In response to Stanley Pogrow's "Avoiding Comprehensive Schoolwide Reform Models," (Educational Leadership, May 2001), the author provides evidence that New American Schools and comprehensive school reform in general work for many students. For example, data show that Houston Success for All schools have registered greater gains on the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) Reading scale in grades 3–5 than other Houston schools and other Texas schools.
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Lisa Bintrim and Kevin Davis
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Amy Eckman
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Vicki Hancock
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