Educational Standards

Since the late 1800s, numerous policies, generally in the form of committee reports, have described what we now call educational standards. In the late 1980s, a new stage of education, the “standards era,” emerged. The origins of this new era can be traced back to A Varian at Risk, a report by the National Commission on Excellence in Education (NCEE, 1983), which included high school graduation requirements in five core subjects-English, mathematics, science, social studies, and computer science. The report also included two recommendations for strengthening the content of the core curriculum and using measurable goals to assess progress in learning. These requirements set the stage for standards as we know them today.In 1989, then President George H.W. Bush met with governors from across the nation in Charlottesville, Virginia, for an education summit, the outcomes of which laid the groundwork for the Goals 2000 Education Program. The creation of those goals led to initiatives for voluntary national standards in all core subjects. That same year, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) published Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) published Science for All Americans. Both publications supported further standardsbased reform.There are three generally accepted reasons for adopting educational standards: to ensure quality, to define goals, and to promote change. Standards are also often considered to be statements of equity, that is, the expectations they express pertain to all students. This report focuses on content standards, though several other types of standards have been developed.The fundamental idea of standards-based reform was to establish clear, coherent, and important content as learning outcomes for K-12 education. Funders and developers assumed that voluntary national standards would be used by state education departments and local jurisdictions to select educational programs, guide instructional practices, and implement assessments that would help students attain the standards. They also assumed that undergraduate teacher education and professional development for classroom teachers would be aligned with standards. These assumptions sound straightforward, but the reality has been considerably more complex. Because of the many independent decisions affecting teacher preparation, curriculum, and testing, the influence of national standards on teaching and learning has been highly variable. In the two decades since the release of Science for All Americans, a number of other STEM-related standards initiatives have been undertaken. In 1991, What Work Requires of Schools, a report of the Secretary’s Commission for Achieving Necessary Skills, and Professional Standards for Teaching Mathematics, an NCTM report, were both published. In 1993, building on Science for All Americans, AAAS published Benchmarks for Science Literacy, followed in 1996 by the NRC’s National Science Education Standards. In 2000, ITEA released Standards for Technological Literacy: Content for the Study of Technology, and NCTM published its revised standards in Principles and Standards for School Mathematics. A third NCTM revision, Current Focal Points for Pre-kindergarten through Grade 8, was published in 2008. Today, as noted earlier, an initiative is under way to develop common core standards in mathematics and science.Learning things is not limited to the scentific area. Instead it also has relations with some other things like speaking a language or using software, including Rosetta Stone English and Rosetta Stone French. If you have a creative mind, you will make all your own differences in the end!