ABSTRACT

Standards and systemic reform are twin pillars supporting contemporary discourse on education reform in the United States. Such was the case at the close of the last century, the beginning of this one, and for the foreseeable future. The standards movement in education seeks to set forth agreed-on goals for student learning in a range of disciplines and across grade levels. Standards are created with an eye toward both practice and knowledge within a domain. For example, standards documents in the domain of science (e.g., American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1993) emphasize both the content knowledge that students should understand (e.g., Newton’s Laws, the particulate nature of matter) as well as the habits of mind employed in the practice of science (e.g., inquiry, hypothesis formation, and testing). Systemic reform attempts to bring about school change by creating alignment across the components of school systems, such as administration and management, curriculum and instruction, assessment, policy, and technology, both within a single school district and between districts, states, and the federal government (Smith & O’Day, 1991). Academic standards have been a major tool for systemic reform proponents, providing target learning goals for policymakers that can then be used in high-stakes assessments designed to (in theory) measure educational progress toward standards. In practice, systemic reform efforts are often top down, beginning with the imposition of federal or state policy (such as the Bush administration’s “No Child Left Behind” education policy), which can leave individual schools and teachers scrambling to figure out how to comply (Goertz, 2001). Because the “how” of systemic reform is left up to individual school districts to determine, it preserves (at least the illusion of) local control, which may be why this mode of reform is so appealing to policymakers.