Survey Seeks To Identify 'Essential' Standards

By Millicent Lawton

Federally funded researchers hope to complete by the end of this school year a survey that identifies what the public thinks are "essential" academic standards outlining what students should know and be able to do.

The aim for researchers at the Mid-Continent Regional Educational Laboratory in Aurora, Colo., is to figure out which are the most broadly accepted and crucial of the 201 standards and 3,291 benchmarks it has in a database compiled from the scores of national and state standards projects.

"Someone has to decide what's essential and what's not essential," Robert J. Marzano, a deputy director of the...