State Standards

Origins of the Standards Movement

The origin of the standards movement can be traced to A Nation at Risk, a 1983 report compiled by the National Commission on Excellence in Education. This report painted a bleak picture of public education in the United States, indicating steadily decreasing scores on a variety of standardized tests, dropping matriculation rates in college, increasing enrollments in remedial mathematics courses, and an alarming rate of functional illiteracy.

In response to this report, numerous professional teachers’ associations compiled standards documents designed to target the reported deficiencies. In 1989, National Council of Teachers of Mathematics published the first such document titled Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics.

The federal government played a substantial role in shaping the standards movement as well. The National Education Goals Panel was formed in 1990 to monitor state progress toward attainment of educational goals. In 1994, the Goals 2000: Educate America Act was enacted with the goal of improving public education by promoting high achievement and equity for all students. The No Child Left Behind Act, signed into law in 2002, tied federal funding for public schools to adequate yearly progress, a measurement of academic achievement indexed by performance on standardized tests. In 2010, the publication of the Common Core State Standards by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers brought increased attention to the need for clarity of standards and preparation of students for either postsecondary education or entry into the workforce.

Content Standards

Content standards are statements of desired student knowledge and ability. They incorporate detailed and explicit statements about particular content and are typically organized by either grade level or by course. Content standards not only describe specifically what students at a particular grade level or in a particular course should know and be able to do but also provide a framework for connecting skills, procedures, and concepts across grade levels and courses.

To make the connections between distinct grade levels or courses more explicit, educators rely on learning progressions. These narrative statements describe stages through which learners will likely progress as they master particular content standards. Additionally, learning progressions highlight the ways in which student understanding changes across grade levels or courses.

Performance Standards

Although content standards specify what students should know and be able to do, performance standards specify a level of mastery to be achieved in relation to the content standards. Each state is responsible for setting its own performance standards and determines what level a student must achieve to be deemed proficient.

See also Common Core State Standards; Curriculum; Formative Assessment; Goals and Objectives; High-Stakes Tests; Policy Evaluation; Problem Solving; Race to the Top