what are academic standards

what are academic standards

Understanding Academic Standards: A Comprehensive Analysis

1. Introduction to Academic Standards

Academic standards have emerged as a key driver of education reform in many states and school systems. As states began mandatory assessments, standards-based reform efforts, those states developing and implementing mandatory assessments were confronted with the questions of what students should know and be able to do, and how well they should be expected to do it. In response, states began to formally outline the knowledge and skills students would need and define the level of performance required to meet established academic standards. Within the evolving context of standards-based reform, some have now begun to consider questions about the broader purposes of reform and the standards-based emphasis on higher achievement and accountability.

There are different types of standards which influence whether or not students’ best efforts effectively realize the well-articulated goals. The standards level is related to the difficulty of the assessment intended to measure the standards. While the application within states may vary, only a small number of states or school systems have formally set performance standards. In states that have done so, the policy environment that supports setting the performance standards is similar. That is, these states have had a relatively long experience with mandatory assessments, and that experience led to the decision to set performance standards.

2. Types of Academic Standards

Driscoll, Halcoussis, and Svorny (2003) differentiate among four types of academic standards: content standards, certification standards, enabling standards, and school quality standards. Content standards specify the body of knowledge that students are expected to understand and, in some cases, how deeply students are expected to understand and apply or use that knowledge. Content standards can be very broad – for example, an expectation that students understand and are able to apply basic mathematical operations such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division – or very detailed – for example, an expectation that third graders understand how to represent, compare, and order fractions using models, symbols, and words. Content standards explicitly define and encourage academic achievement.

Certification standards are promotional standards in the sense that schools promote students from one grade to the next based partially on whether students meet these standards. Students meeting these standards can earn a high school diploma. Certification standards are more stringent than content standards and thus are a higher standard. Performance standards used to measure student achievement on standardized tests are certification standards. Although certification standards are not necessarily the same for all students, many critics argue that the emphasis on standardized test scores is based on a business model and “does not reflect the best in education was because of students learned the material or because schools learned how to produce students that score high on the tests.”

3. Implementation and Assessment of Academic Standards

Understanding academic standards will not, of itself, improve performance. Grounded in a theory of effective instruction, detailed standards define learning objectives for curriculum, instruction, and assessment. The fundamental assumption is that desired student outcomes depend on the quality of instruction and that teachers, along with the principals overseeing them, and students are the first line of reform. Accordingly, standards are viewed as necessary but not sufficient to improve student learning. Empowered by high-quality standards, local actors are expected to apply knowledge and skills in diverse educational environments. Standards make expectations clear to stakeholders, including parents and post-secondary organizations. To ensure that all students reach high academic standards, policymakers need to expect excellence throughout the educational system. The knowledge and skills described in standards provide a clear target and should underlie all assessments on what students can do. However, high-quality assessments require careful attention to the relationship between the standards and targets, and the validity and reliability of the assessments developed to measure student learning. Balancing pressures for external versus internal examinations is one contentious design issue. The stakes of performance standards for students and educators are also debatable.

Addressing student heterogeneity remains a critical policy concern as academic standards are implemented and tested on a quarter of a billion individuals. Concern about equity arises in all nations despite differing student selection and ideological premises. Differences in achievement stem from multiple factors and their relationship with curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment are neither simple nor unidirectional. Schools should, however, work to accommodate a broad range of student characteristics, flexible in matching teaching strategies with varying levels of learning aptitude. On its face, academic standards are elitist by privileging high-ability students. Customization around them can assure that standards-based reform improves education for all students. Standards may also prevent education from being dumbed down. That is, by being specific and detailed, standards avoid generalities and inefficiencies that can undermine the quality of education. Conversely, lower-level students who benefit from a traditional curriculum are disadvantaged when it is abridged to emphasize higher-level students alone. Considerable concerns also exist over the creation of an academic underclass that is permanently educationally disadvantaged by high-stakes testing. The U.S. Office for Civil Rights reported the resurgence of tracking, which has immediate affective implications for the way students perceive their ability and that of schools towards different groups of learners. Furthermore, in some cultures, low-achieving students have little achievement motivation, causing them less distress at underperforming.

4. Impact of Academic Standards on Education and Society

The proposed model imposes a series of conditions on the life cycle behavior and on the organization of production that have implications for a wide range of economic and policy issues. Although these implications should be largely familiar, our presentation of them is new and may lead to new interpretations or give new prominence to certain issues. Moreover, our approach often allows us to address issues very simply, using an economic model far less detailed and complex than the typical models in these literatures.

The first condition on the life cycle behavior of individuals is that, in any period, the utility that individuals obtain from market work and the utility they obtain from non-market production of home goods must satisfy an equality. Because the market good is a flow of only one form of earnings and the home good is a flow of many forms of earnings, this implies that the individual’s preference must be governed by an equivalence scale that maps earnings flows into a composite consumption flow. This is standard in household production theory. We also use it in our model as a practical matter to restrict the utility function of the individual and thereby define a clear metric for assessing tax reform. We’ll discuss this further below.