Anticipating Goals 2000 Standards, Assessment, and Public Policy: Summary of a Workshop (1995) / Chapter Skim
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USING STANDARDS AS ACCOUNTABILITY TOOLS
USING STANDARDS AS ACCOUNTABILITY TOOLS
Pages 1-8
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The goals of the workshop were to help policy makers and others better understand the complex issues emerging fro the standards~based reform movement, to elevate the level of discourse about standards and assessments beyond conventional wisdom and common generalities, and to highlight areas in which farther research and exploration are needed. The workshop format included presentations on critical national and state issues con'
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It is time, they say, to loosen the federal and state input requirements that have locked up the system, in exchange for greater attention to outcome standards specifying the content knowledge and skills to be taught and reamed and the levels of performance to be attained. In this way, accountability for tax dollars would be enforced by assessing, monitoring, publicizing outcomes, and possibly attaching sanctions and rewards to performance.
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Rather, some fundamental beliefs appear to be shared by those who favor an emphasis on outcomes and those who ado care regulation of inputs. For example, those who support fiscal incentives to schools with outstanding performance must implicitly assume that extra monetary inputs make a difference, else they would have little value as rewards.
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The workshop discussion of inputs and outcomes turned also to the debate over the the usefulness of trying to determine a production function for education: to identify, or even quantify, which kinds of inputs produce particular kinds of student outcomes and then build those characteristics into standards and linked assessments. Is it possible, for instance, to identify how much training in specific content a teacher needs in order to teach students to a particular performance level?
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One set of recommendations has been published by the Goals 3 and 4 Standards Review Technical Planning Group:2 For national subject-specific content standards, the criterion descriptors identified by the Technical Planning Group are: worId-cIass, important and focused, useful, reflective of broad consensus-building, balanced, accurate and sound, clear and usable, assessable, adaptable, and developmentally appropriate. For state content standards, the criterion descriptors are: as rigorous as national subjectspecific standards, feasible, cumulatively adequate, encouraging of students' ability to integrate and apply knowledge and skills from various subjects, and reflective of broad state consensus-building.
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Another perplexing question is how to ensure that standards are genuine motivators for improved teaching and reaming. The prevailing wisdom is that content and performance standards will motivate higher performance by providing a clearer direction to schools about instructional changes needed, a clearer message to students, teachers, and parents about the pefformance expected, and a clearer yardstick for the public and policy makers about the progress made.
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Legal Ramifications of Standards Will opportunity-to-ream standards generate a spate of lawsuits by parents and others dissatisfied with schools, as some have suggested? David Tatel's presentation, and the discussion that ensued, shed light on a legal aspect of reform that is often overlooked: opportunity-to-ream standards may be a less effective tool for courts to order change than content and performance standards.
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" Sylvia Johnson a a a a FOR FURTHER ANALYSIS · Which applications of content and performance standards, opportunity-to-ream standards, and other governance strategies or requirements can ensure both high performance and equitable resources for reaming? Which kinds of classroom inputs translate into desirable student outcomes?
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