Published: January 5, 2006
One Language
With Standards Comes a Requirement to Reduce Variability in the Quality of Instruction
As a former U.S. commissioner of education statistics, I’ve thought long and hard about the value of standards in national and international standings and how they could be deployed to raise the bar for student achievement across the country. In my federal post, I oversaw the first analysis of the Third International Mathematics and Science Study, or timss, comparing the achievement and teaching methods used in 41 nations. As Delaware’s state schools chief, I worked closely with school districts in the early 1990s (it’s a small state, after all) in building an understanding of the relationship of student performance to well-developed, rigorous education standards by emphasizing the critical roles of core-curriculum frameworks.
But it was not until I became the superintendent of schools for the Austin, Texas, district in 1999 that I came to understand fully the importance of standards in guiding a diverse, urban school district and the challenges facing such large urban districts in meeting high performance standards in every classroom. When I arrived in Austin, I found a district that was all pluribus and no unum. This was largely the result of leadership turnover—seven superintendents in 10 years—and the absence of clear academic expectations. Texas had developed a fine set of standards—the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, or TEKS. They’re as good as any in the nation. But they had not penetrated Austin’s classrooms. Texas also had a fairly sophisticated accountability system, which disaggregated results by students’ family income and ethnicity and was a precursor to the system set up by the federal No Child Left Behind Act. As you would suspect, with wide variability in teaching practice, we had wide variability in results, almost all of which correlated with and never exceeded predictors based on family income.
This had to change, and change quickly. I found myself running more than 5,000 franchises called classrooms, and none of them were speaking the same language. From the start, then, we decreed that the state standards would be our guideposts, and that they would apply to every classroom and student. We would have the same high standards for our most affluent and lowest-income schools. We also shifted our funding to provide extra dollars to the...
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