Standards: The View From the Classroom

To find out what teachers think about national standards, Education Week asked the Widmeyer Group, a Washington-based consulting company, to conduct two focus groups of elementary teachers.

We chose elementary educators because they will have to implement standards across a wide range of disciplines. We selected New Jersey so that we could draw teachers from rural, urban, and suburban communities in a state that is developing its own content standards.

One group of teachers received copies of the national standards in the arts, civics, geography, history, mathematics, physical education, science, and social studies beforehand. The second group got a chance to look at excerpts from the standards during the focus-group session and discussed the idea...