ABSTRACT
Over the past three decades, several successive waves of education reform have built on the idea that strong and clear educational standards are central to efforts to improve the schooling achievement of students in order to turn around a crisis in U.S. education (Hamilton, Stecher, & Yuan, 2008; McDermott, 2011). This belief is also held key to reducing evidence of persistent gaps in achievement test scores between low-scoring ethnic/racial minority groups, such as many Latinos, and White students, largely of northern European heritage, who score much higher on tests. The sentiment is that educational standards can make clear what students are expected to learn and be able to do at various grade levels and cumulatively across grades, supported by instruction. Subsequently, performance on annual tests based on standards would show concomitant improvement in students’ achievement. These aspirations have proved elusive and grossly unmet, yet they remain central to reform arguments used by policy makers and educators (Hought & Elliot, 2011).
