Higher standards are the foundation for improving the achievement of all our students.
Last week's national education summit has been dismissed by some as "just talk" and public relations. I think that view is a big mistake. The summit, sponsored by the National Governors' Association and IBM's CEO Louis Gerstner, took steps which, over time, will lead to a vast improvement in school achievement.
The summit is the latest in a number of events leading to change. The first was the publication of "A Nation At Risk" in 1983. Ridiculed and dismissed by most educators, it woke up the nation. It lead to fewer Mickey Mouse courses, more academic course work, and higher entry standards for teachers. Most important, it led to the education summit of 1989.
The first summit was convened by President Bush, He, together with the nation's governors, led by then-governor Bill Clinton, expressed dissatisfaction with the speed of reform. To hasten reform, and define it more specifically, the president and the governors unanimously put forward the national education goals. The goals made more specific where we needed to go and when we were aiming to get there.
To help achieve the goals, President Bush proposed legislation called America 2000, which was not passed because it contained a controversial school voucher proposal. President Clinton reintroduced the legislation, with modifications, as Goals 2000, and it passed with an overwhelming bipartisan vote early in 1994. For the first time, the Congress adopted national education goals and provided seed money for states to develop standards and assessments in each academic discipline. Almost all of the states participated.
The 1994 elections brought a new Congress in -- a Congress that did not want the federal government to play any role in developing education standards. Many governors were elected at the same time, and they wondered whether they should continue with the process.
Last week's summit answered that question with a resounding yes, even though only six governors were there who had been present in 1989. The states would take responsibility for developing world-class standards and assessments designed to measure whether the standards were being met. Those governors who had doubts or were under pressure to reject standards were immensely aided. It was clear that all the states were going to do this. If one or two decided not to, they would be depriving their students of educational opportunities -- and, as 50 business leaders pointed out, their states of economic opportunities. The governors will also try to establish a voluntary, nongovernmental clearinghouse where each state can find out how it standards compare with those of other states and other countries. While each state will develop its own standards, there is implicit agreement that there's no reason why a student in Kentucky should not learn the same math as students in California.
There was another breakthrough. The resolution adopted by the summit participants called for corporations to ask for high school transcripts and take student school performance into account in employment decisions. This will be a big step in providing incentives for students to work hard to meet the school standards. (Colleges and universities take notice.)
Some educators were worried because Louis Gerstner of IBM rather than the president of the United States convened the summit. Would education be narrowed for vocational interests? Gerstner laid that fear to rest when he repeatedly stated on TV and at the summit, "We're not interested in having schools train students in how to use machine tools or spreadsheets. What is killing us is having to teach students how to read, compute, communicate and think."
Now the question is whether the states will move ahead effectively. They will face a number of tough decisions:
State standards or local standards? Some are pushing for local. But that's what we have now; that's what brought us to this mess. Though localities are good at many things, they do not have the capacity to develop standards and assessments. As a result, instead of local standards, we actually have national standards determined by the text books we buy. These are low level and unfocused because textbooks were not designed to be standards. Also, local standards imply that the math a student should know would be different depending on which school district the student lived in. Is that what we want?
Voluntary or mandatory? Some governors played with the idea that the state standards would be voluntary and the local districts would comply anyway. Before we go along with that, let's try an experiment. Make compliance with traffic signals voluntary and see if drivers and pedestrians comply anyway.
General or specific standards? Most standards tell us what students are expected to know by the time they are 17 or 18. That's not good enough. Unless we have standards that tell us, grade by grade, what the teacher is required to teach and the students required to learn, many of our students will not reach the level of competence that we expect of high school graduates.
It would be wrong to imply that the governors and business leaders have reached a state of unanimity about U.S. education and what it needs. But the summit revealed that they are united about one basic point: Higher standards are the foundation for improving the achievement of all our students, and they must come first. Other reforms may work, but we will never know unless we have standards and assessments by which no measure their success.