A Decade of Standards

This week, Education Week , Teacher Magazine ’s sister publication, released Quality Counts 2006 , the 10th edition of its annual report on the condition of education across the states. Taking an appropriately retrospective approach, this year’s report examines the overall impact of the states' efforts to carry out standards-based education over the past decade. In a recent interview, we asked Lynn Olson, executive project editor of Quality Counts , and Christopher B. Swanson, director of the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center, about some of the report’s findings in relation to teachers.

Q: How do you think the teaching profession has changed in the past 10 years as a result of the push for standards-based education?

Lynn Olson: I think people now realize that the quality of teaching is key to helping students achieve high standards, although there’s a continued debate about how best to measure “teacher quality.” One thing we’ve noticed is the increasing focus on whether teachers have the subject-matter knowledge to teach the content that students are supposed to learn. For example, 42 states and the District of Columbia now require high school teachers to pass subject-matter tests to earn their initial licenses, up from 29 states in 2000. And 33 states require high school teachers to have majored in the subject they plan to teach, compared to 23 states in the 2000 edition of Quality Counts .