academic standards

academic standards

The Importance of Academic Standards in Education

1. Introduction to Academic Standards

Academic standards represent the aspirations and expectations that a society has for the learning of its students. All students need to meet high standards and expectations, as measured by widely accepted, meaningful, fair, and observable criteria. These standards signal the knowledge and skills that provide a foundation for successful learning in later grades and that are essential for further education, work, and civic life. Setting high standards for all children and youth is more important than ever. It is important to understand how the world of education has changed over the past century. More is known today about how children learn, what they are capable of learning, and how to assess their learning. There are also growing global pressures for education reform. Education is critical to national competitiveness, to accelerating scientific discovery and technological advances, and to maintaining vibrant economies and the social cohesion of democratic nations in an era of increasing interconnectedness.

This paper provides a conceptual overview of the importance of academic standards in education. Academic standards offer a framework for promoting adequate student achievement in every school, communicating what is important in school programs, and facilitating accountability by pointing to and measuring educational progress and providing goals for school improvement. It is important to feel comfortable with the rationale for using academic standards in defining high educational achievement for children. This is especially so at a time when education reform has become an important part of public dialogue. However, the concepts are complex. Through examination of key principles underlying academic standards, it is possible to build an understanding of the perspectives from which academic standards are viewed and what they are expected to accomplish. The paper concludes with a summary of the key messages important to improving standards-based reform efforts.

2. Benefits of Implementing Academic Standards

One of the main advantages of setting clear academic standards is alignment. If there are no standards for what teachers ought to be teaching students, then there may be gaps in learning. This can lead to frustration on the part of instructional professionals. Each and every educator wants to make a positive contribution to their students. When they are not sure of what needs to be taught, how it should be taught, and when it should be taught, they are largely in the dark. Without a plan, it is very difficult to create learning goals. If the goals are non-existent, how can the goals be met? It is an impossible scenario. By setting clear and notable academic standards, it provides a map for all educators to follow. This map shows clearly what material is age-appropriate to be taught, along with what level of teaching needs to be accomplished at each point. These standards give investigating professionals the tools and basic points to monitor and measure their own learning progress and also how the standards are being met.

Using academic standards assists in collaboration among students, school staff, and parents. When testing is about to take place, this is often a chaotic time when all other things stop. Teachers need to decide which students will be tested, and the choice of students often can play a significant role in a teacher’s evaluation. This is the incentive behind instructional professionals choosing children who are not doing well to be the ones tested. This makes it appear as though the learning goals are being met. When a student is doing significantly better in school, there is less pressure to help that student. When assessments are tied to curriculum and are frequent, the walls between students, teachers, and parents begin to fall. Working together, we can ensure that no child is at a disadvantage when learning goals are being met. An essential point in regard to testing and standards is that they help parents understand the learning objectives of their children. When each standard is easily explained and it is easy to understand, this creates a basic framework to open communication between home and school. Such dialogue often leads to increased parental involvement, which is an essential component of student success.

3. Challenges and Criticisms of Academic Standards

This brief overview of academic standards’ positive and significant impact should be kept in context: Real issues and concerns must be dealt with if there is plenty of debate about standards. This section summarizes many of the challenges and criticisms that standards advocates and reformers have encountered. These are issues that should be addressed not only by experts and policymakers but also conservatives, liberals, and others simply because those individuals in the real world to whom these standards are supposed to apply.

Whether or not standards are a governmental intrusion into the academic process, parents, teachers, and others argue that they are weary of documents from the state departments of education dictating curriculum. Vouchers or even charters might be a remedy. However, the issue is rather more complex if we assume that parents have a right to have schools that are “good”. Utility theory, therefore, suggests that one must know if students were actually taught the set of identified misconceptions called for by the standards. If the answer is “no,” then employing value-added can be an insidious subversion of the critical knowledge that the standards movement is trying to promulgate.

4. Strategies for Effective Implementation of Academic Standards

Standards-based report cards are graded report cards that identify the specific learning goals or standards for a grade level. They then use achievement scores to show a student’s progress toward mastery of each standard. This type of reporting provides parents with detailed performance information about a student’s strengths and weaknesses, giving teachers and parents a better understanding of how well students are mastering the material taught. The report cards help teachers identify what students have and have not accomplished, where students need extra help, where to build on a student’s success, and how to develop individual education plans when necessary.

Academic coaches are a more formal approach for providing supportive assistance to new teachers and to experienced teachers who need help in transitioning to standards-based teaching and assessment. Academic coaches are typically school-based professionals who have expertise in such matters, often resulting from specialized training. They are usually experienced teachers who possess good interpersonal and coaching skills. Because they are often classroom-based, they have immediate credibility with teachers they are helping. The help that coaches provide ranges from collaboration in long-term planning of curriculum to advice on specific instructional strategies and sample assessment techniques that demonstrate student learning according to standards. Academic coaches are often trained in the use of effective collaboration strategies as they work with teachers to analyze student work, refine lessons, and reevaluate and reflect on the effectiveness of their teaching practice.

5. Future Directions and Innovations in Academic Standards

During the past decade, issues surrounding academic standards in all four areas of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) have received considerable attention from the research and policy communities. Test-based accountability has shifted focus from inputs to outputs, as measured by these assessments, and a major concern has been whether the standards are consistent or high enough to signal meaningful levels of content mastery. That is, are the expectations for proficiency adequate in the common core of standards across even very diverse states? Our findings, summarized in this chapter, suggest that these concerns are well-founded and that considerable attention to sound, high-quality standards is needed in their development and augmentation.

In this final chapter, we address a set of issues that on one hand has not been much explored by the research community yet would, on the other hand, seem to point the standards movement in its most promising directions. In particular, there is opportunity for further research to inform practice with respect to more conceptually coherent standards, better assessments of more difficult content, standards based on audience, and standards linked to improvements in instruction and professional development. What evidence is there, for example, on the overlap and depth of expected proficiency levels for the standards that have been developed and implemented to date? Is there, indeed, a “widening gap” problem for the states, as Haney and Madaus have recently suggested? Before the NCLB era, much of the attention paid to issues surrounding academic standards for students and their assessments centered around cross-state comparisons.