Making Standards Work: Active Voices, Focused Learning
February 1999
Robin Lake, Paul Hill, Lauren O'Toole, Mary Beth Celio
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This report, published in February 1999, works at identifying steps Washington state schools can take to improve new state assessment scores and meet higher state standards. Follow-up reports include Making Standards Stick (2000) and Making Standards Meaningful (2001).
In 1993, Washington State committed to a new strategy in education reform. The state's Commission on Student Learning set out to identify student learning standards, which clarify what students must know and be able to do if they are to succeed as adults in the 21st Century. Based on these standards, the state designed tests that will tell whether individual students, schools, school districts, and the state as a whole, are meeting the standards. The state also committed to a set of actions to help struggling schools, eliminate regulations that reduce school effectiveness, and help teachers do their jobs better.
Washington's new state education system is still "under construction." However, its first elements are now in place. Children in fourth grade took the new statewide tests in reading, writing, mathematics, and listening for the first time in Spring 1997, and again in 1998. Other elements of the state reform, including a school performance accountability system, assistance for schools struggling to meet the standards, and new tests (for students in the 7th and 10th grades, covering history, social studies, and science), will all be introduced in 1999 and 2000.
It is too early to assess the overall success of the new state standards and tests. But it is time to use the information we have to learn how schools whose students do well on the early tests differ from schools whose students do less well, and then to identify ways that struggling schools can get the help they need.
