National organizations devoted to every subject area from civics to physical education are working intently to define standards for what students should know and be able to do in their subjects. The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics led the way when it released math standards in 1989. Standards in the arts (visual art, music, theatre, and dance) followed in March 1994, and standards in geography were released last month. Standards in many other subject areas—including history, foreign languages, and science—have been circulating in draft form for some time.
Although most of the national standards are still in development, they are already making their influence felt at the state and district levels, experts say. Yet this influence may be less dramatic than some proponents had hoped for. Local curriculum developers are treating the national standards as a resource to draw upon if they choose, not as a blueprint for transforming the curriculum, observers say. And nowhere, it appears, are educators adopting them wholesale.
Curriculum deliberations in Missouri offer a case in point. Committees in various subject areas are using the national standards as they revise the state's curriculum framework, says Warren Solomon, a curriculum consultant who chairs the social studies committee. Solomon's committee is "looking carefully" at the national standards developed in history, geography, civics and government, and by the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS), he says. Committee members have found the various standards documents "a very useful resource" to borrow from and compare ideas against.
Solomon's committee doesn't feel bound to follow the standards too closely, however. For example, they are using "broad questions" to organize the social studies, rather than dividing them into disciplines such as geography and history, as the standards documents do. "We wanted a different conceptual pattern," Solomon says. "We're pulling [ideas] from the standards to fit our own organizational scheme."
Solomon's committee is also being less specific about what content to teach than the national groups; they are "borrowing big ideas" and creating standards that are more generic. Detailed decisions about content should be made by teachers at the local level, Solomon says—and sometimes by students, to encourage them to take an active stance toward learning.
The national standards are influencing curriculum deliberations at the district level in a similar way, says Walter Parker, who heads the department of social studies at the University of Washington's College of Education. Parker is often asked to advise committees of teachers charged with revamping their district's social studies curriculum. Such committees should use the national standards documents as resources, Parker believes. Because the standards represent "the most recent, blue-ribbon efforts to identify essential content," to ignore them would be "folly," he says.
But do district-level committees actually use the standards as a resource? Only sometimes, Parker reports. Draft standards are often included in a reading packet for committee members, but "it's quite a different matter to get them on the table." Sometimes the standards are ignored because the committee believes it must give "virgin birth" to its own document—one that reflects local concerns, Parker says. The upshot is that most committees create a document only "slightly influenced" by the thinking of national groups.
Federal legislation also promotes the national standards—but, again, only as a resource to draw upon. The Goals 2000: Educate America Act, signed into law last March, encourages states to set standards, explains Mike Cohen, senior advisor to the U.S. Secretary of Education. But the Act does not tie funding to the use of national standards; these should be seen as "resources, not requirements," he emphasizes.
States can perform a critical role by "filtering" the national standards for districts, Cohen says—a function that can be seen either as rigidly narrowing choices for localities or as "making life easier" for them. Many districts don't have the capacity to start from scratch by wading through all the standards documents, Cohen says.
To forestall this very difficulty, John Kendall and Robert Marzano of the Mid-continent Regional Educational Laboratory (McREL) in Aurora, Colo., have distilled the emerging standards in science, mathematics, history, geography, reading and writing, and "workplace basics" into a single, user-friendly document. Their report, which bears the forbidding title The Systematic Identification and Articulation of Content Standards and Benchmarks, is designed "to afford districts and schools the opportunity to construct their own standards with as much information as possible," Kendall says. The authors hope it will save others the time and expense that McREL has invested to summarize and collate the standards—and to reconcile conceptual differences among the various documents.
Without the McREL report, a school or district wanting to set standards would have to scrutinize all the subject-area documents, Marzano notes. The educators charged with this task would soon discover that the various documents define standards differently and contain different levels of generality. They would also have to wrestle with questions such as how to incorporate reasoning skills, which cut across the disciplines. "We've dealt with all those problems up front," Marzano says.
Another initiative to make the national standards more user-friendly is being undertaken by the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO). Using nearly $1 million in grants, the CCSSO will help states and national-standards projects exchange information about their respective efforts; help states coordinate the development and use of standards; support states in their pursuit of systemic reform; and provide technical assistance to states as needed. "The new CCSSO program has the potential to optimize the use of standards in instructional reform by the states," says Ramsay Selden, director of CCSSO's State Education Assessment Center.
Five Questions That Need Answers
Before setting its own standards, a school or district should answer five basic questions, John Kendall and Robert Marzano of McREL advise. These questions are inherent in a standards-based approach to schooling. If they are neglected at the outset, confusion is likely to follow.
How many standards and benchmarks will be articulated? Standards describe what a student should know and be able to do, in terms of broad concepts and generalities—for example, "demonstrates number sense." Benchmarks are statements of the particular knowledge and skills expected at various developmental levels—for example, at 8th grade, "demonstrates an understanding of primes, factors, multiples, ratios, and proportions."Kendall and Marzano's report lists 1,541 benchmarks embedded within 157 standards. As the authors note, requiring students to demonstrate competence in all of these would not be feasible. A reasonable number of benchmarks, they recommend, is about 600 to be covered during the K–12 years.
In what format will benchmarks be articulated? A school or district could state benchmarks as lists of declarative, procedural, and contextual knowledge; this is the approach Kendall and Marzano follow. An alternative is to state benchmarks as performance tasks. This approach allows for the combining of benchmarks, giving teachers a creative and powerful way to organize content. If performance tasks are "codified" and used as a means to define curriculum, however, this approach may restrict the manner in which students can demonstrate their knowledge and skills in a given domain.
Will students need to achieve all selected benchmarks to demonstrate competence in a standard? A school or district might consider benchmarks as exemplars—rather than necessary components—of a standard, and require students to show mastery of a sample of the benchmarks for a given standard. However, this approach could undermine continuity of coverage within a content domain (since different teachers might select different benchmark exemplars); it could also defeat the purposes of some well-designed standards, such as those from Project 2061, where upper-level benchmarks depend on students' familiarity with concepts addressed at an earlier level.
Will student performance be reported using course grades or standards? Traditional grading practices and standards-based assessment are not incompatible; a school or district must simply distribute and weight the standards across courses in a systematic, well-reasoned fashion. A second option, however, is to report student progress by benchmarks rather than by a single grade. When this approach is taken, schools and districts commonly use rubrics. Assuming a four-point rubric, each student would receive a score of 1 through 4 on each benchmark assessed within a standard. These scores could then be averaged to obtain an overall score for that standard.
Will all students be required to meet all standards? A major decision is whether students will be required to meet a targeted level of knowledge and skills. One option is to require that students meet the performance standards on some, but not all, benchmarks (a set of core requirements).
Adapted from The Systematic Identification and Articulation of Content Standards and Benchmarks (January 1994 update) by John Kendall and Robert Marzano of McREL.
