ABSTRACT
Beginning in 1989 when the governors blessed the concept of standards as a major tool of educational reform in our nation, the public rhetoric about high and rigorous standards has gathered momentum steadily throughout the early 1990s. Encouraged by the success of the curriculum standards in mathematics (NCTM, 1989) federal and state policy makers supported the development of standards in other curriculum areas, The early 1990s saw federally sponsored curriculum standards projects funded in the arts, civics, English, geography, history, science, and foreign language (even if not all met with uniformly high success, including the Standards Project in English Language Arts). In an even earlier effort, the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS, 1990) began the process of developing standards to guide the creation of assessments for the advanced certification of teachers. States got into the standards business very early, some even before the watershed governor’s conference of 1989 (e.g., California,, 1989), and the momentum for state and local standards development was enhanced by federal legislation promoting their development and mandating their use.
