State standards and accountability systems can be both good and bad, contended Carl Glickman of the University of Georgia. "It infuriates my friends who are against standards that I can see parts of this [movement] that actually are very reasonable and make good sense," he joked. Glickman listed these good aspects of standards:
- "There's an emphasis in standards that every child is expected to achieve at higher levels than ever before. And teachers and schools will be publicly responsible for proving that this can be done."
- "In some state accountability systems, there's greater targeting of resources and funds to those schools where students are not achieving" at the specified level.
- "In a number of states now, you can't hold students and schools accountable unless you equalize the funding within a state, so you see some dramatic change in the distribution of state funds."
- "Some states have fairly good standards. Most educators who have been involved with them think, 'Yeah, kids should learn these things.' And they have assessments that are not narrow or intrusive, and that give kids multiple opportunities to show what they have learned." On the other hand, Glickman cited these negative aspects of standards:
- Standards contribute to "the exercise of unilateral state control in all operational aspects of schools, where standards, assessments, curriculum, the consequences of the tests, budgets, resources, staffing, and governance of the schools are all controlled at the state level."
- In some states, "narrow standards are established for every academic area; there are single-format tests; and a level of mastery is established [based on] one group's idea of what every student needs to learn by a certain time. Not only is that bad; it's a bit scary."
- "Some of it is poor science. Not accounting for improvement in schools but simply using absolute measures, and using tests as the sole criterion for school accountability—that's just bad science."
- Many states "provide no allowances for what I call 'prototype schools or districts' to develop their own standards and assessments that challenge the state system. So you have only one state model of what it means to be well educated."
- "When you have a lack of challenge to the mainstream idea of what a well-educated person is, you actually erode the concept of a democracy. Most of our state standards and accountability systems offer a definition of 'well educated' and mandate that schools conform to that definition."