Charles M. Reigeluth

The educational standards movement has gained much public visibility, including issues devoted largely to this topic in the Kappan (June 1995), Educational Researcher (November 1996), and Educational Leadership (March 1995). Rigorous educational standards have been strongly advocated by many people, both within and outside the educational establishment, including the participants at the recent National Education Summit, who were primarily U.S. governors and business leaders. And many states have passed, or are working on, legislation for educational standards. Clearly, this is an important issue that is likely to impact all who have a stake in public education.

Partly for this reason, there are also many cautionary voices about educational standards. Some voices express concern about whether standards should be mandatory or voluntary. Some express concern about who should define the standards (e.g., government versus professional associations like the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics) and on what level (national, state, or local). Other voices express concern that the standards movement will lead to test-driven instruction (such as Ted Sizer) or will impede the move toward thematic or interdisciplinary instruction. And still others caution that higher academic standards are necessary but not sufficient for improving public education.

Complicating the picture is that different people have different conceptions of standards. For example, Darrell and Donna Sabers identify business leaders' "hire" standards to ensure students are employable, government leaders' higher (more rigorous) standards to maintain world-class status for the U.S., and educators' high standards (expectations) to promote high levels of student achievement. Anne Lewis identifies content standards, performance standards, opportunity-to-learn standards, and world-class standards. And the variety of conceptions goes on.

Perhaps the major reason for these differing conceptions of standards is differing reasons that people want standards. In my conversations with business leaders in Indiana, they seem most interested in ensuring that the high school graduates they hire are able to read and write and compute. They expect to provide job training, but not basic skills education. The purpose of "hire" standards seems to be one of minimum standards to ensure competence in basic skills for all students, and they seem to be conceived more as mandatory than as voluntary.

In contrast, government leaders seem more interested in improving U.S. students' world rankings, which requires far more than ensuring attainment of basic skills. For example, the New Standards (a joint effort of the National Center on Education and the Economy and the Learning Research and Development Center), seem intended as a tool for educational reform to help schools "work as systems whose parts are focused on coherent, consistent, publicly articulated goals" because

On the other hand, many educators seem more interested in standards as a vehicle for professionalizing teaching. As Matthew Gandal of the American Federation of Teachers put it:

Still other people have other purposes for advocating standards.

Given all these purposes and conceptions of educational standards, as well as the cautionary voices about them, what is a reasonable stance to take on standards? To address this question, it is helpful to understand that standards can be used in two very different ways that represent very different views of education, each of which can be applied to any of the purposes described earlier. They can be used as tools for standardization—to help make all students alike. Or they can be used as tools for customization—to help meet individual students' needs. Sabers and Sabers lament,

This article addresses both the consequences and what the standards should be with respect to standardizing or customizing education.

At the National Education Summit in 1996, as well as in many of the articles on standards, educational standards are characterized as tools for standardization. Martin Covington states: "... after reading the Summit statement one is left with the impression that achievement standards are best thought to be imposed equally on all children, irrespective of ability or circumstance." This seems particularly ironic, given that many business leaders are evolving their companies from standardization to customization. The terms "uniform standards" and "common standards" are often used to characterize this conception of standards. But what are the likely consequences of conceiving educational standards in this way?

First of all, because students differ greatly in ability (ranging from severely learning disabled to highly gifted)—as well as in learning skills, prior knowledge, home environment, and so forth—it seems likely that standards which are challenging for some students will be easy for others. Therefore, uniform standards cannot be challenging (rigorous) for all students and cannot attain the frequently stated goal of standards: accelerating student performance.

Secondly, as Covington puts it, "If students cannot now measure up to old, presumably less demanding standards, increased demands seem pointless." To the extent that uniform standards are applied, even with high-stakes accountability, they will likely lead to more frustration for students and teachers and more high school dropouts, unless great emphasis is placed on improving educational processes. This will require a considerable investment in professional development (intensive rather than piecemeal), powerful learning resources (largely technology-based), and systemic change (largely in the roles of teachers, learners, and administrators). Yet there is little talk about such investments accompanying the new standards, and without them the new standards may well do more harm than good.

A third consequence of higher uniform standards—especially if high-stakes accountability is attached to them—is that teachers will feel forced to devote more time to whatever the standards call for, regardless of whether or not they, their students, and their students' parents believe those standards are important. This will make the educational system less flexible at a time when many policy makers and educators alike are calling for more flexibility. The Education Commission for the States (ECS), which advises state legislatures and the same governors who attended the National Education Summit, states:

Similarly, given their current frequently exclusive emphasis on academic achievement, higher uniform standards will also likely result in less time being devoted to the important nonacademic missions that schools serve. The most recent "Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll of the Public's Attitudes toward the Public Schools" revealed considerable support for nonacademic purposes of public schools (see Table 1).

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Insert Table 1 about here

(6 Missions of Public Schools)

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Also, Daniel Goleman has made a persuasive case that a small public-school investment in emotional and social development can have a powerful influence on reducing violence, teen pregnancy, drug dependence, depression, and many other social problems that end up costing us far more—and he describes schools where successful emotional and social development programs have been designed and implemented. There is a danger that a focus on academic standards with high-stakes accountability will impede the development and spread of such programs, even though the public feels they are important.

Although there are some similarities, standards for education also have some important differences from standards for business. A manufacturer wants all its microwave ovens to meet specified quality standards. That's good. But to what extent do we want all students to be alike? Of course, there are certain basic skills we want all students to master, but should the students all be required or expected to attain them at exactly the same age or grade level? To use a travel analogy, standards for manufacturing seem as though they should be much like a single destination for all travelers to reach, whereas standards for education seem more like they should be milestones on many never-ending journeys whereby different travelers may go to many different places. We must be careful not to overgeneralize what works well for business.

Based on a careful analysis of consequences, it seems that uniform or common higher standards could have considerable negative consequences for public education. But standards could instead have considerable positive consequences. How must they be operationalized for this to happen?

Martin Covington helps to capture a critical difference in ways standards can be operationalized:

For standards to have a positive effect on meeting student needs, we must think of them differently from playing a role in the intensification of the currently predominant standardization approach to education.

If the goal of the standards movement is to accelerate learning for all students, especially low-achieving students, we must recognize that different students learn at different rates. Yet our current system is characterized by grade levels with classes and classrooms in which students typically all learn the same thing at the same time. By holding time constant, we force achievement to vary among students, with the consequence that the low-achieving ones gradually accumulate deficits in learning that handicap them in their future learning endeavors. Our current time-based system serves the function of sorting students, and we have developed norm-based testing (grading on a curve) and tracking as additional tools to that end. A focus on sorting students may have met an important need during the industrial age, when we needed large numbers of people for assembly-line jobs, but it is antithetical to helping all students achieve hire, higher, or high standards. So the very structure of our educational system works against the goals of the standards movement.

To refocus our educational system on meeting high standards, however you conceptualize them, we must no longer hold time constant; we must allow students the time they need to reach each standard. But to hold back the faster learners while the slower ones reach the standard would be to lower the standards for those students. So we must look for alternatives to our current mindset of classes and classrooms in which all students learn the same thing at the same time. We need customization to replace standardization, in order to have an educational system that is focused on learning (attaining high standards) rather than on sorting. This does not mean that the standards for faster learners should be different from those for slower learners; rather it means that we should not expect all students to meet the standards in the same time frames. Further rationale for this conclusion is provided by differences in developmental rates for learners of the same age, differences in opportunities to learn outside of school, differences in prior knowledge and skills, differences in interests, and many other factors.

Depending on how they are conceived, standards can be used to foster either a standardized approach to education (a sorting-focused system) or a customized approach (a learning-focused system). The following are some principles that reflect a role for standards in a learning-focused (customized, learner-centered, results-oriented) approach to education.

Standards as levels of attainment. Standards should represent levels of attainment, with many different levels in each area of competence. As Gandal put it, "We can establish challenging standards without sacrificing rigor by developing multiple levels of achievement for each content standard." These levels of achievement are similar to the notion of different performance standards for a given content standard. And different content standards also frequently represent different levels of complexity. Students, then, advance to progressively higher standards in different areas of competence.

Standards without timetables. Standards should not be tied to age levels or time in any way. This represents the greatest departure from common or uniform standards. Some standards may be common in the sense that all students should eventually attain them (e.g., basic skills), but many should not be required of all students; they should represent areas for students to pursue their interests and develop their unique talents. Options are as important a feature of automobile manufacture as standards are. But no standards should be common in the sense that all students should be required to attain them at the same age. As Covington put it,

Standards in all areas. Standards should be identified in all areas of learning and human development—nonacademic areas as well as academic (e.g., emotional development, physical fitness, all seven intelligences). They should be in civic areas as well as workplace preparation. They should address communities' needs as well as students'. As Mary McCaslin put it, "Achievement is one aspect of being a student; failure to recognize the larger arena within which achievement is pursued is to risk attainment of Summit goals." The National Education Summit concluded that "standards can be effective only if they represent what parents, employers, educators, and community members believe children should learn and be able to do." For standards to be effective in a learning-focused educational system, this statement should be qualified so that it is not necessary for these stakeholders to believe a certain attainment is important for all children, nor is it necessary for all of these stakeholders to believe that a certain attainment is important for any child. Several observers have expressed concern that "the sheer bulk of some of the [new education standards] will make it difficult for schools to put together a coordinated curriculum." However, for a learning-focused, customized educational system, that level of specification will help educators to generate diverse educational resources to support learning, and it will help them to keep track of learners' diverse attainments, though technological tools will be important for managing this diversity.

Choice within limits. Gary Natriello advocated that standards "must be challenging yet attainable to students who differ in ability." How can this be accomplished? Teachers, parents, and students should be allowed to decide when a given standard is appropriate ("challenging yet attainable") for a child during the child's development, within certain limits. Those limits should be ascribed by the general principle that attainments highly valued by the community and/or state (such as mandatory basic skills) should be pursued in a timely fashion. Teachers, parents, and students should also be allowed some degree of choice as to which standards to pursue, beyond those deemed essential by the community and/or the state.

Learning-focused instructional processes. Standards must be accompanied by instructional processes that allow children to continue to work on the attainment of a standard until it is reached. Standards must be tools for "success for all students," not tools to propagate the traditional focus on sorting students. Even in business, the focus is on preventing defects in a product and immediately correcting those that do occur. As Rhona Weinstein put it,

So what are an appropriate pedagogy and systemic support? To allow children to continue to work on a standard until it is reached, the pedagogy must be flexible enough to allow different students to be working on different standards at the same time. This means the teacher's role must change from being a "sage on the stage" to being a "guide on the side"—a coach, a mentor. For this to work, there must be much more reliance on team-based learning, self-regulated learning, and advanced technology as tools for customized learning. We have much to learn to fully develop the potential of this kind of pedagogy, yet important inroads have already been made.

However, as Weinstein indicated, to be successful, this kind of pedagogy must be accompanied by systemic support. It may not be useful to think in terms of teachers working alone in self-contained classrooms with the day divided into periods (or even blocks) and time-based grade levels. Again, we have much to learn about how to redesign the "system" to support a learning-focused pedagogy. But when we look at schools that have been successful in helping all students reach higher standards, such as Central Park East and Weld County School District 6 in Greeley and Evans Colorado, we find that a statement of standards was not among the most important factors; a learner-centered (customized) focus was, including a learning-focused pedagogy and systemic support.

Unfortunately, much of the discussion of standards seems to assume a "magic bullet" mentality that overlooks the considerable complexity and systemic interdependencies that will strongly influence our ability to truly help all students reach higher standards of excellence.

Performance-based measures. A standard should, if possible, be specific enough to be measurable. But we must recognize that some standards cannot truly be measured until many years after the corresponding educational experiences took place, such as certain standards in civic education or in parenting. And there are some standards for which any cost-effective measure will inevitably be unreliable, such as standards for attitudes about, say, the importance of reading or the arts. Nevertheless, aside from these relatively rare problems, a standard should be specific enough to be measurable. But how specific is specific enough?

Sabers and Sabers propose that "too much specificity drastically limits the domain of behaviors and tasks relevant to the measurement of success." Is this always a bad thing? Certainly for some types of learning, it is indeed useful to maintain a broad domain of behaviors and tasks that can indicate success. But are there not other types of learning for which it is important to limit the domain to some extent, perhaps moreso in a customized system than in a standardized system? It seems reasonable that different types of learning should have different degrees to which the domain of behaviors and tasks is limited, with some appropriately being considerably limited. And to the extent that the domain is not very limited for a standard, there should be a variety of kinds of performance-based measures for determining whether or not the standard has been met.

Certification of standards. Given that there exists a wide variety of standards within a wide variety of areas, and given that students have different needs, interests, and talents, it seems reasonable that different types of degrees or certificates should be offered for different combinations of standards. An extreme for customizing the certification of standards met would be a personal portfolio, which provides such an overwhelming amount of information that no two students' "certification" would be alike. The opposite extreme is our current high school diploma, which tells you so little about what a given student has actually learned that it makes most students look alike. But there could be intermediate degrees of certification that are in essence "package deals" which indicate the student has reached certain determined standards in certain determined areas.

Positive incentives for meeting standards. In addition to having (a) learning-focused instructional processes, (b) performance-based measures, and (c) a wide variety of certificates, standards should be accompanied by positive rather than negative incentives. Monetary sanctions and rigid controls in particular are likely to produce the opposite of the desired effect of increasing the standards that students are able to attain.

Limitations of standards. Elliot Eisner has proposed that "... standards do not represent the most important ends we seek in education. ... We seek work that displays ingenuity, complexity, and the student's personal signature." So we should find ways to represent those grander ends in our specifications of what is important to teach and assess. Eisner talks much about the value of criteria in lieu of standards for assessing (and presumably coaching the attainment of) these important educational ends.

It seems that, in spite of many different conceptions of standards (such as "hire" standards, higher standards, and high standards), there is consensus that the major purpose of standards is to accelerate student learning and performance. But this can be done only by getting students to spend more time actively mentally engaged in learning. Perhaps the two most important conditions for active mental engagement are the intensity of motivation to learn and the quality of the instructional support for learning. And, as was discussed above, common, uniform standards are actually likely to be counterproductive to both of these conditions. To support the goal of accelerating learning and performance, we need standards that support customization rather than standardization in education.

But even such standards alone will not create either of the conditions for active mental engagement. Also needed are significant stakeholder-designed changes in the use of time, talent, and technology—time, in the form of allowing students the time they need to reach each standard; talent in the form of changing the roles of students, teachers, and administrators (which requires a sustained program of professional development); and technology in the form of providing teachers and students with more powerful tools for learning. And these changes need to be supported by changes in the ways schools, school districts, and state education agencies are organized, administered, and governed, so as to provide appropriate systemic supports. As David Cohen put it:

Standards, properly conceived, are just one necessary, but not sufficient, part of a comprehensive redesign of a very complex educational system, as the exemplary effort in Weld County School District 6 in Colorado aptly demonstrates. If not properly conceived, standards can do far more harm than good. As Maehr and Maehr put it, "Emphasizing standards is an all too ready, all too quick solution to a much more complex issue." We must recognize this complexity, use standards to support customization rather than standardization, and address all the interrelated parts of the system (e.g., instructional processes, assessment, and systemic supports). Otherwise, the standards movement will inevitably end up as yet another wave of reform that came and went without any positive impact on student learning.

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Charles Reigeluth is Professor of Instructional Systems Technology, School of Education, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405 reigelut@indiana.edu