National and State Standards & Benchmarks - McRel
At Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning (McREL), we draw upon the best of more than four decades of education research to create practical, user-friendly products that help educators create classrooms that provide all students with opportunities for success.
Purpose of this work
Many educators see the publication of the now-famous report A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983) as the initiating event of the modern standards movement. Few calls to action have been so often quoted as the dire pronouncements from that report: "The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people. . . . We have, in effect been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament" (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983, p. 5).
Amid growing concerns about the educational preparation of the nation's youth, President Bush and the nation's governors called an Education Summit in Charlottesville in September 1989. That summit concluded with the establishment of six broad goals for education that were to be reached by the year 2000. The goals and their rationale are published under the title The National Education Goals Report: Building a Nation of Learners (National Education Goals Panel [NEGP], 1991). Two of the goals (3 and 4) related specifically to academic achievement:
Goal 3: By the year 2000, American students will leave grades 4, 8, and 12 having demonstrated competency in challenging subject matter including English, mathematics, science, history, and geography; and every school in America will ensure that all students learn to use their minds well, so they may be prepared for responsible citizenship, further learning, and productive employment in our modern economy.
Goal 4: By the year 2000, U.S. students will be first in the world in science and mathematics achievement.
The goals were outlined in the State of the Union of 1990, a year which also saw congress establish the National Education Goals Panel (NEGP); the following year, congress established the National Council on Education Standards and Testing (NCEST). Collectively, these two groups were charged with addressing unprecedented questions regarding American education such as, What is the subject matter to be addressed? What types of assessments should be used? What standards of performance should be set?
These efforts had an impact on national subject-matter organizations, who sought to establish standards in their respective areas. Many of these groups looked for guidance from the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), which preempted the public mandate for standards by publishing the Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics in 1989. The National Academy of Sciences used the apparent success of the NCTM standards as the impetus for urging Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander to underwrite national standards-setting efforts in other content areas. According to Diane Ravitch, then an assistant secretary of education, "Alexander bankrolled the projects out of his office's discretionary budget" (in Diegmueller, 1995, p. 5). The National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) quickly launched independent attempts to identify standards in science. Efforts soon followed in the fields of civics, dance, theater, music, art, English language arts, history, and social studies, to name a few. (An overview of the movement to establish standards in the core subject areas is reported in Table 1.1) Since 1990 the movement has acquired considerable momentum at the state level as well. As of 1999, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and every state except Iowa have set or are setting common academic standards for students. (American Federation of Teachers, 1999).
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