Education Standards 2004

Purpose and intent of standards

Though numerous critiques have expressed other expectations, standards have never been intended to serve as a curriculum. In fact, their developers clearly caution against such use, stressing instead that their purpose is to provide enough criteria to serve local entities in formulating curricula that meets minimum recommendations of what students should understand and be able to do while serving to meet local needs as defined by location, student population, teacher-preparedness, and so forth. Likewise, the sequence of actual instructional material contained in coursework—not to be confused with standards at particular grade bands as part of an overall continuum of understanding—has not been an intent of early pioneers of standards development. In contrast, they have intended that standards be concerned with how we teach and learn, espousing the view that how we do science, history, and mathematics is an essential part of what students should know and be able to do, and that how a teacher approaches a domain-specific study will play a role in determining what the student learns from an epistemological stance—inseparable from content and proven essential by research if content learning or transfer is to take place. Given these various intents and purposes, no single level of specificity in content or sequence has been identified as appropriate for all schools or system personnel.

Organization of standards as per precedent and purpose

Though legislation may eventually bring change, standards documents are still primarily organized to suit their original intent—to facilitate decision-making by those who utilize the documents. Also, though legislation has placed the responsibility, scrutiny, and authority with states, state-level documents still by and large draw upon the sound groundwork of the "national" documents in the core subjects.

In exploring the organization, it is useful to consider the overarching goals provided by the developers—some as distinct lists and some embedded in eloquent narrative—as well as the content, process skills, teaching and programmatic aspects inherently related to achieving those goals. Below, the first figure deals with the basic components and organization of four core "national" standards documents—for History, Science, Mathematics, and English Language Arts. The sample provided is based on analysis of Principles and Standards for School Mathematics (NCTM, 2000). Links provide access to similar diagrams for the other three subjects. In subsequent diagrams, information and links are provided to assist those who wish to read or conduct further analysis. In the case of history and science the seminal work is highlighted, and links are also provided to a variety of national standards documents in other domains, especially those related to social studies, of which history is considered only one aspect in most state-level documents. Finally, while reviewing the organization of national standards documents, it is helpful to note the increasingly common practice of expressing student learning expectations within a standard as a progressive continuum across grade-level bands. Though the manner in which this is accomplished varies across subjects and documents, The Measurement Standard Continuum: An Example of Progressive Complexity in Student Expectations provides insight as it traces the progress students are expected to make from prekindergarten through grade 12 as expressed in the first goal of the Measurement content standard in Principles and Standards for School Mathematics.

Review the components and organization of the national standards for science, history, and language arts, as well. To view a similar diagram describing any of these documents, click on the desired link below. The diagram will appear in a pop-up window in the upper left portion of your screen. National Science Education Standards (National Research Council, 1996) National Standards for History (National Center for History in the Schools, 1996 revised) Standards for the English Language Arts (National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association, 1996)

Stakes in the States: The call for coherence and its impacts on specificity of standards

Standards developers at the state level face a dilemma that is similar to that faced by developers at the national level previously discussed—how specific is specific enough? In the U.S., the need and desire to honor the right of local parents, teachers, and school boards to establish their own goals and make decisions that soundly support achieving those goals is no less acute at the state level than at the national. Given that the "national" documents were constructed with this philosophy, as well as the level of support and broad input that went into their creation, it is not surprising that state developers have patterned much of their state-level standards work after the national documents and other seminal pieces of work (e.g., Building a History Curriculum, Benchmarks for Science Literacy, and so forth). However, the No Child Left Behind legislation, while respecting this time-honored tradition, presents certain high-stakes considerations that impact the question of specificity. While the federal government has not set any specific conceptual criteria or domain-specific understandings that all students should know and be able to do, they have implied levels of quality in specificity of standards—a state's standards should be challenging, easy-to-understand, well-organized, and most importantly, coherently aligned with achievement measures that are consistent across (see sidebar) the state. These non-specific requirements are impacting states' standards development insofar as specificity is concerned. States continue to struggle to reach the appropriate balancing point at which local control can be honored while content standards, student achievement standards with cut scores, and assessments are aligned to the point where AYP can be measured by results on tests.

Standards: Useful to all stakeholders

The value of standards to those who bear the responsibility of designing and implementing local curricula has been stated, but their value far exceeds that mark. Developers and instructional material designers must utilize standards to guide their efforts if teachers are to have the resources they need to help students reach the goals attainable through standards criteria. There are, however, numerous ways to contribute as a developer to attainment of these criteria. Materials may directly address standards through student content and instructional procedure, or they may, as opposed to many interpretations, be highly useful simply as resource materials. Trade books are only one specific example of the latter—they seldom are intended to result in meeting standards criteria of their own accord, yet when used in certain ways, for purposes that have been carefully planned in advance by qualified teachers, they provide a rich means of propelling students toward the prize. The key, therefore, is not that developers must "meet" the standards, but that they must have "purpose" and "target" in mind when materials are designed and built, and that these contentions are clearly conveyed to teachers and local curriculum developers. Although the level of flexibility required often depends on the particular content or process learning to be addressed, generally speaking the more flexible their use the better. Materials should also be designed with high quality educators in mind—developing with average or below average professionals in mind encourages ease of below-average teaching. The best teachers will account for the real learning that takes place, and it is incumbent upon developers to provide them, first and foremost, with every possible tool they may need to help mold our future society through our children. The intent of the organization of the standards documents themselves is to facilitate decisions by local educators, curriculum specialists, and developers/providers of education resources—far from the intent of an actual curriculum.

Check out the following related resources. Files are provided in print-optimized PDF. The Exploratory Report is 152 K and the white paper is 832 K.