Standards without exams "are not worth a whole lot," Marc Tucker of the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE) told his audience. "If you can't measure a kid's progress toward a standard, the standard is largely symbolic." Tucker is coauthor, with Judy Codding, of the 1998 book Standards for Our Schools: How to Set Them, Measure Them, and Reach Them.
In making his argument, Tucker described the work of New Standards, a joint project of NCEE and the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh. Since 1990, New Standards has been creating a system of internationally benchmarked standards and assessments that measure student performance against the standards. (For more information, visit www.ncee.org/OurPrograms/nsPage.html.)
Before developing New Standards, those involved in the project studied education systems abroad. "Every country that we visited that had high [student] performance at the top, and a small range of performance between the top and the bottom, had standards," Tucker recalled.
Tucker and his colleagues found these successful practices in other countries inspirational. "Having high standards for all kids, making those standards clear, and having meeting the standards connected to something kids wanted for themselves—Those were very powerful ideas," he said. "And so we said to ourselves, `Why not create in the United States a new kind of exam system, with one standard for all kids, the purpose of which [would be] not to sort kids out, but rather to drive performance up?'"
Tucker stressed the importance of aligning standards, curriculum, and assessments. "If you go to other countries," he said, "you'll often find curriculum that is less engaging [than in the United States] but more effective because it's directly connected to what kids are supposed to learn and it's what's being assessed." In the United States, by contrast, standards, curriculum, and tests are not necessarily aligned.
"Even in those countries where the standards are relatively pedestrian, the exams are relatively pedestrian, and the curriculum is relatively pedestrian, they're getting better results," Tucker said. "Imagine what [results] you could get if none of it was pedestrian!"