What is the problem with today’s standards?

Today’s accountability systems rely heavily on testing to determine if students have learned what states say they should know. Tests and standards are supposed to work hand in hand. But that alignment is far from reality in most states. As two leaders of the standards movement, Marc Tucker and Judy Codding (2002/1998), have written, “In many states, the standards themselves are narrow, poorly written, and sometimes just plain wrong. In others, the tests used to measure student progress are only vaguely related to the standards, measure only a small part of what is worth teaching and knowing, are poorly constructed, and, for all these reasons, cannot bear the weight of the consequences that fall on students and teachers when scores are low.”

Part of this misalignment stems from the sheer volume of material that most standards documents deem essential. Because content standards are created by subject matter experts, there is a tendency for each discipline to prioritize its subject area over others. Historians favor history, scientists weigh in on the side of science, and English teachers want students to spend their time reading and writing. When you add it all up, the amount of material crammed into most standards documents is daunting. Researchers at the Mid-Regional Educational Research Lab (MCREL) have determined that it could take as much as 22 years of schooling to adequately cover the content identified in typical standards (Marzano & Kendall, 1998).

If a state’s content standards are too vast, teachers don’t know what to focus on or where to direct their students’ efforts. And this then leads back to the challenges of testing. Test makers cannot assess everything in the standards, so they often employ a sampling strategy—tests some curricular objectives one year, others the next year, and some never at all. As W. James Popham (2006) observes, “...teachers then are obliged to guess which curricular aims will be assessed in a given year. Not surprisingly, many guess wrong.”

These mile-wide, inch-deep standards don’t promote student learning either. As Linda Darling-Hammond (2002) points out, U.S. mathematics standards typically cover far more topics than those in countries that have higher levels of achievement on international tests. In Japan, she notes, students might study four or five mathematics concepts intensely over a school year. American students, instead, typically spend a week on a given topic. Deep mastery never occurs, so basic concepts like fractions are repeated year after year, frustrating students and teachers alike.

Yet while they span too many content topics, today’s standards fail to address other knowledge and skills that are critical to success in the 21st century. Despite increased accountability and the growth of standards-based reform, there’s ample evidence that American students need better preparation for the future than they’re getting from today’s schools. Business leaders worldwide are speaking out on the need to ensure continued competitiveness in the new global economy. The 2006 “Are They Really Ready to Work?” report showed that employers are concerned about the lack of “applied skills” of those entering the workforce. A recent ACT report (ACT, 2007) identified state standards as a major contributor to the gap between what U.S. high schools are teaching and what colleges want incoming freshman to know. Current standards, according to ACT’s president and COO, Cynthia Schmeiser, “are trying to cover too much ground … As a result, key academic skills needed for success in college get short shrift.”