Making Standards Work

For all the debate about the standards movement in political circles, think tanks and the op-ed pages of daily newspapers, most educators welcome the idea.

By providing consensus about what's important for students to learn and what skills they should acquire, standards give direction to reform initiatives. They also bring much-needed focus to curriculum development efforts and provide the impetus for new forms of student assessment.

To realize the benefits of standards, however, educational leaders must keep in mind three essential principles.

* Principle No. 1: The ideas are more important than the vocabulary we use.

Many educators today are embroiled in a war of words that engenders passionate arguments and long debates. These arguments also squander precious time and detract from the important work that needs to be done.

I became aware of this war several years ago when asked to facilitate the work of a school district's ineffective curriculum development committee. I quickly discovered that the committee members were lost in a tangled thicket of terminology. Most of their time was spent in squabbles about whether particular concepts should be labeled "goals" or "objectives."

My first action was to write this simple phrase on a sheet of paper: "The student will be able to ..." I then added a popular, performance-based verb, such as "demonstrate," and completed the statement with some elements of content. I asked the group to read this statement and tell me if it was a(n): a. Goal, b. Objective, c. Outcome, d. Competency, e. Standard, f. Proficiency, g. Performance, h. Expectation, I. Aspiration or j. New Year's Resolution.

The resulting debate took up most of the next hour. Yet when I took my statement to the high school cafeteria where students were having lunch and asked 10 students the same question, each gave me the same immediate answer: "Who cares?"

Educators must be clear about what they expect students to learn and be able to do. It is also crucial to decide what evidence best reflects that learning. In the long run, however, the label we attach to those things is unimportant. To the degree that distinctions in terminology are helpful and provide clarification, they should be used. But the confusion and distraction that such distinctions often cause must be avoided. Being clear about what we want students to learn is far more important than the specific vocabulary we use to describe those things.

Dust-Free Frameworks

* Principle No. 2: Good ideas can be implemented poorly or not at all.

The end product of nearly all efforts to clarify educational goals is a document typically labeled a curriculum framework or set of learning standards. In most cases, these documents are bound in large notebooks, color-coded by level and distributed to teachers. Although they may be the pride of curriculum directors, how--or even whether--these frameworks are used is rarely considered.

If curriculum frameworks and learning standards are to make a difference in classroom practice and lead to improvements in students' learning, we must give serious consideration to how they can be implemented practically and efficiently. Otherwise our latest efforts, like those of earlier decades, will end on a shelf gathering dust.

Implementation considerations should involve the difficult task of bridging the chasm between our goals and prevailing policies and practices. We must consider, for example, what types of professional development administrators and teachers will need to implement these new learning standards, what additional materials and resources will be required and how the effects of these efforts will be assessed and evaluated.

Regardless of the work that goes into clarifying our educational goals, their true value will depend directly on the quality of implementation.

* Principle No. 3: Success hinges on what happens at the classroom level.

Studies of change convincingly show that success always hinges on what happens at the smallest unit of the organization. What this says to educational leaders is that successful improvement efforts will always hinge on what happens in the classroom, regardless of what occurs at the national, state or even district level.

As William Cooley recently lamented to a conference audience of the American Educational Research Association: "I have concluded that most educational reform takes place in our literature and on the pages of Education Week, not in schools and classrooms. ... It seemed to me that all this talk about waves and waves of reforms really refers to trends in the reform literature, not changes that are really taking place in real schools."

Improvement in education means more students learning better. The only level at which that generally takes place is in classrooms. Sadly, judged by the criterion of classroom impact, most educational reforms have a poor record of success. Even reforms that include development of high-level learning standards for students, paired with performance assessments on which teachers are held accountable for results, show relatively modest change in classroom practice; significant change is tied more directly to well-targeted, high-quality, ongoing, job-embedded professional development.

Efforts to clarify what students should learn and be able to do are vitally important. Such efforts provide essential focus and direction in reform initiatives at all levels. But to lead to significant improvements in student learning, serious consideration must be given to the impact of these standards on classroom practice and the conditions necessary for change at that level.

A Dynamic Process

Clarifying our educational goals will never be easy. The process is enormously complex and often highly political. The dynamic nature of our society and the world also make it a continuously evolving process. The learning goals we establish today are unlikely to be adequate five years from now and will surely be antiquated 10 years hence.

Nevertheless, the process is essential to teaching and learning at all levels and, therefore, a task we must achieve. Investment in the principles described here will not make the process less challenging. It will ensure, however, that efforts remain focused on the issues most crucial to success.

Thomas Guskey is a professor of education at University of Kentucky, Lexington, Ky. 40506.

COPYRIGHT 1999 American Association of School Administrators
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group