The Supports Students Need to Meet High Academic Standards

A Forum — January 24, 2001

AYPF participated in a town meeting event co-sponsored with a local Washington, DC citizen’s education reform collaborative, DC VOICE, to which the local community and the national policy community were invited. The occasion was the release of a DC VOICE community research publication, Half the Solution: The Supports DC Students Need to Meet High Academic Standards, that documented the community’s understanding of and response to the DC Public Schools standards-based reform strategy to improve student achievement.

Asa G. Hilliard, Professor of Urban Studies at Georgia State University, provided background on, and caveats to, the current standards movement and moderated the discussion of concerned parents, educators, and local policymakers. According to Hilliard, standards have been adopted as a strategy of the education reform movement, but mostly evidenced in the administration of high stakes, standardized tests. He related what we know to be effective in helping students to reach high achievement, but how prevailing policy has side stepped the obvious conclusions. He noted:

• Prior to the current standards-based reform movement, groups such as the National Alliance of Black Educators argued for high standards for all students with expectations for them, such as the ability to write persuasively, prepare a lengthy research document, and complete Calculus and the equivalent of general chemistry by the end of 12th grade. But those expectations were not in line with the policies of the 1980s that focused on mastery of minimum competencies.

• There have always existed powerful schools that have successfully educated poor and minority children to high standards. Current examples of schools have been captured through the work of groups such as The Education Trust. Successful practices have been documented in publications, such as Results by Mike Schmoker (e.g., delineating measurable goals, collecting performance data, and creating an environment for effective teamwork where teachers’ successes are shared to benefit all students).

• We know from research, the impact on students of consecutive years of poor instruction (e.g., Sanders, W. & Rivers, J. 1996. Cumulative and residual effects of teachers on future student academic achievement. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Value-Added Research and Assessment Center).

But, rather than culling the powerful policy implications of this knowledge, the interpretation has been to correlate poverty, not the quality of resources, with poor achievement. According to Hilliard, the application of standards and high stakes tests has brought a measure of accountability to U.S. public education, but has also raised questions about the fairness of expecting all schools and students to meet high standards despite vast resource disparities.

Advocates of high standards argue that frequent testing aligned with curriculum requirements can (1) confirm that teachers and administrators are succeeding in imparting academic skills to their students, and (2) ensure that students are learning these skills they will need to become successful adults. Few criticize the policy of holding students and schools accountable to high standards, but high standards are only half the solution. Without the necessary academic and social supports, Hilliard worries that raising the standards will simply lead to higher failure rates rather than an improvement of student achievement or reform of the education system.

To be effective, testing programs for educational accountability purposes must have mechanisms in place for:

• holding schools accountable for the quality and appropriateness of instruction,
• determining students’ understanding of the standard of knowledge offered, and
• acting on this information by providing the appropriate supports to students and teachers to ensure command of this knowledge.

The critical feature is the alignment of the curriculum taught in schools and the standards that students are expected to meet. The curriculum must be reformed to ensure that students are effectively and efficiently taught the skills required to meet high standards and the tests must be adjusted so that they accurately measure what the students are taught. Once the curriculum, tests, and standards are aligned, there is still a question of how testing affects the assumptions and objectives of our educational system.

Hilliard warns that an over-reliance on tests might spur teachers to employ rote content knowledge lessons rather than assignments that foster creative thinking and other skills that are harder to measure with tests. If such teaching strategies were used exclusively in affluent suburban schools, Hilliard argues that teachers and administrators would be up in arms. But education professionals and policymakers are often willing to support such curriculum reforms in high-poverty, low-performing inner-city schools as long as they raise test scores (regardless of the cost in terms of creativity in teaching and learning). In the end, Hilliard sees potential in the standards movement as long as it leads to multiple measures of accountability accompanied by multiple means of student and school support.

Half the Solution reveals many of the problems associated with the standards movement. In conducting the research for the report, DC VOICE convened focus groups of parents, students and teachers in DCPS to determine what supports are available to students to help them meet expected standards of learning. The study's findings provide insight into a community’s understanding of and reaction to standards-based reform and closely parallel many of Hilliard’s concerns. Among the findings reported:

• Parents and community members do not understand the standards and how they relate to student achievement.
• The Stanford Achievement Test, Edition 9, undermines standards-based reform because it is not aligned with DCPS Standards for Teaching and Learning.
• Teachers face challenges integrating standards into their classrooms because the district does not provide adequate training, curriculum and technology support, and appropriate assessments for standards-based teaching.
• Inadequate facilities and lack of basic resources, such as books, technology and equipment, obstruct efforts by students and teachers to meet the standards.
• Teachers report a lack of opportunity for quality professional development and productive interaction with other teachers and administrators.
• Expanded programming by community-based organizations is needed to address students’ academic and social issues, especially for middle and high school students.
• Increased collaboration between community-based organizations and the schools is needed to prevent isolated and duplicated academic social services.

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