| State Responsibility for Student Opportunity |
Commitment to Standards and Success for All In November 1987, the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) adopted a policy statement, Assuring School Success for Students at Risk. As we noted then: The 1987 policy statement continued with provisions for the conditions of a quality education program that must be available, and it made the commitment that "the states and local and federal governments must increase resources for education; the practice of teaching must be strengthened; schools must be helped to change their programs and improve their effectiveness; parents and communities must be engaged with schools in full partnerships." These bold objectives established by the Council for the states in 1987 are as important today as they were then. As chief state school officers, we share a commitment to advocate for young people; it is our responsibility to make sure all students have the opportunity to achieve state and national education goals. Achievement of our objectives must be revisited as we reach the halfway point of the 1990s. We still believe that if our nation's students are to achieve at higher levels, each student must have access to and engage in a high-quality education. If we are to prosper as a nation--to prosper economically and to function as an enduring, representative democracy--we must make certain that each child has a chance to learn, achieve, and be a productive member of society. The public has this in mind when it expects the schools to ensure that our students will be contributing citizens in a strong nation. This expectation is not a partisan issue--nor should it become one: Ensuring educational success for all students requires the entire nation to work together. We cannot hope for systemwide improvement and a high-achieving student body if we do not make it a national priority to pay attention to the achievement of each student within the system. Why must each student achieve at levels higher than ever before? For most of this century, schools provided the basics needed for an economy and a way of life that have all but disappeared. But students today face challenges unlike any that their parents and grandparents confronted. Their futures will require the ability to continue learning and applying much more challenging concepts and to adapt to ever-changing jobs. As adults, our children will need to use numerical skills that involve reasoning to solve problems; to write and communicate more effectively with coworkers and others; to learn new tools and applications; and to undergo training and retraining. Capabilities of this kind will be essential to earning an income that supports a family and provides for the next generation. In addition to teaching students the fundamentals of reading, writing, and arithmetic, schools today must equip students with the ability to understand concepts, organize their knowledge, and apply what they have learned to new materials and situations. Schools must change so that all students acquire these skills. To help schools make this transition, educators are developing--and discussing with the public--standards that spell out the increased levels of skills and knowledge that all students will need to succeed. States must provide leadership for this process. As states are (1) developing standards as part of state improvement plans and pursuant to federal legislation and (2) working through court challenges to the equity of their within-state resource allocation, they are all challenged to define, provide, and show the results of ensuring opportunity for students to achieve the goals. These are issues of fairness for students and schools. As we raise student standards higher than they have ever been, we have an obligation to ensure that schools have the capacity to enable all students to achieve these higher standards. Students cannot be held responsible for learning material they have not been taught. As we hold students accountable, we must hold schools accountable as well. How then can we know whether schools are doing what is reasonably expected to produce the high levels of achievement that we want for all our children? It is these fairness issues to which the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) devotes attention in this policy statement. Based on the work in their respective states and their collective work through CCSSO, the nation's chief state school officers agree on this statement on measuring school quality and the conditions of schooling that are necessary to translate standards into the high levels of achievement that virtually all students can master. Together with reforms in what is taught and how students are tested, schools need new methods for evaluating the conditions that are most directly related to improving student achievement. Through this statement, CCSSO intends to promote a constructive discussion among all those who have a vital stake in education--students, educators, parents and other community members, employers, and policymakers--to encourage further research and to solicit ideas for improving our knowledge about how best to improve elementary and secondary education. This statement addresses four important issues: 1. How should school capacity for high-quality teaching and learning be measured? 2. How should indicators of quality be used, and who should use them? 3. What new indicators of school capacity are being developed? 4. How can information on education expenditures, school safety, and community resources support schools' capacity to achieve high academic standards for all students? Fortunately, promising developments in research and demonstrated practices provide guidance to intelligent and enlightened judgments on these questions. Defining and Measuring School Capacity to Achieve the GoalsState regulations for schools are not new. Ever since the creation of school systems, states have set minimum standards that schools must meet to receive state recognition, accreditation, and funding. For example, state rules often specify the number of minutes per day for instruction in each subject, the number of days in a school year, the minimum qualifications for teachers and other personnel, and the number of students per teacher. Standards have varied substantially among the states, but in general they have focused on "input" factors and usually have been loosely related to student achievement. States are now reviewing these kinds of regulations to focus on more effectively ensuring that all students within their jurisdictions have a fair opportunity to learn academic content. States are searching for indicators that are accurate, clear, and relevant to high achievement expectations. We need to know if the curriculum and instructional practices are being implemented in ways that enable virtually all students to achieve at much higher levels. We need to have indicators that demonstrate whether schools are providing safe and orderly learning environments. Policymakers and the public need to know that the public investment in education is being spent on those practices that will improve student achievement. What Purposes Do Indicators of School Quality Serve?Americans use indicators in everyday life. The number of miles per gallon tells us how economical a car is to operate. Products on the grocery store shelf report the number of calories per serving. Consumer Reports rates washing machines and other consumer items. When a child complains about not feeling well, parents use a thermometer to find out if he or she has a fever. These are indicators that tell us something about what we want to know, but they do not tell us everything. When the thermometer shows a temperature of 103 degrees, we do not know what is causing the fever. The doctor must run a series of tests on the child before knowing its cause. Education, too, has indicators. The most common are test scores, but single test scores are of little use if teachers and parents want to know why a student has not passed a test or why a school's scores in reading are lower or higher than they were last year. Schools need indicators that help tell us about the "why" and the "how," not just the "what." School quality indicators can serve three purposes: to inform the public, to improve student achievement, and to provide accountability for school success. Public AccountabilityPublic expectations for schools are measured every year by the Gallup Poll. According to the latest survey of attitudes toward public schools released in September 1995, the public's number one priority is "placing more emphasis on higher achievement," followed closely by "better discipline and less crime and violence." Parents, employers, and policymakers, as well as educators, have a vital stake in improving education. They all want to know whether or not students are achieving high standards. They want to know how their own child's school, the community's schools, and the state's education system are preparing all students to become well-educated adults who can provide for their families, fulfill the needs of the labor market, and participate in a democratic society. They also want their children to be safe; and they want to know if they are getting their money's worth when they vote on a school bond issue and pay taxes. Many states and local school districts produce school report cards as a way of providing parents and the public with information about individual schools and their performance, compared with other schools. Regular reporting of indicators about academic achievement, an environment conducive to learning, and other conditions will go far toward meeting public expectations that schools are working to raise student achievement and to improve school safety. Public reporting of information about schools serves other interests. Where parents can choose the school they want for their child, a fuller range of information than test scores alone will enable them to make a more informed choice. Information about how curriculum and instruction is designed so that all learners can achieve the standards informs parents about the kind of learning activities they can use at home to reinforce classroom activities. When teachers and parents are sending the same message about high expectations for learning, such reinforcement is far more likely to occur. Indicators about the conditions that are known to be directly related to high student achievement can provide an inspiring vision of good teaching and schooling for educators, parents, and other interested citizens. Improving Achievement
Indicators assist schools in improving classroom instruction by providing tools for self-evaluation. Types of instructional practice known to help students master certain skills can be monitored over time. Where content standards call for thinking and problem-solving skills, teachers can begin to monitor the change in their instructional strategies--away from lecturing and directing students to memorize facts and formulas, toward practices that require students to apply their knowledge in active ways to solve problems. Information about which combination of those two instructional practices teachers are using can shed light on test results. This information also becomes the basis of faculty discussion and reflection so that teachers have some way to know if they are improving and how they might better their classroom practice.
Indicators can describe the extent to which schools across districts, states, or regions of a state are implementing instruction that is consistent with the content standards. In mathematics, for example, the standard might require that all students successfully complete Algebra I by the ninth grade. Data collected about how many students accomplish that goal enable local and state educators to identify schools with low pass rates and then work with those schools to ensure that all students in the state have had access to and successfully achieve Algebra I expectations.
To diagnose causes of poor student achievement, we need more consistent information about what is happening in classrooms. Test results tell us what students know and can do, but they do not tell us why achievement is poor or how to improve it. Without knowing the cause, schools may blame students and their parents. The purpose of testing, however, is not to pass the blame. It is to uncover the possible reasons for poor student achievement and try to solve them. Methods, such as curriculum audits, can find out whether a school's curriculum covers the same ground that is on the test. If the results reveal that parts of the curriculum were never taught in several classrooms, that information can be used to help those teachers adopt new practices so that the entire subject matter is taught.
On the other hand, if indicators show that the materials related to content standards and tests have been covered but that there has been a high student absentee rate, remedies that center on attendance are in order.
Information on instructional practice, curriculum content, and other conditions must be collected and disseminated in effective ways. Data must be given to teachers and principals so that they can use it for continual school improvement. Schools that have a vision of high achievement for children need empirical evidence of their progress toward fulfilling it. Knowing more about problems will suggest possible solutions, whether it is better understanding of content standards, different ways of communicating with students, or improved school and classroom management. As states are establishing academic goals in the form of content and student performance standards, their attention is shifting away from the old minimum input rules to a greater focus on the results schools are achieving. This shift in focus is partly due to the recognition that many of the old rules have not produced useful indicators of school quality. We must have a greater focus on student results. In addition, there is a forceful moral argument that students who are compelled by law to attend elementary and secondary schools cannot be consigned to schools that fail year after year. State legislatures and school boards are increasingly adopting policies that hold schools (and sometimes districts) accountable for student achievement. Those policies call for various degrees of state involvement in local school affairs, such as requiring improvement plans; providing technical assistance; and, on rare occasion, ordering the removal of the principal and reassignment of teachers.
Currently, however, the predominate indicators of school success or failure are scores on statewide tests. That information usually provides no satisfactory explanation of why a school is not succeeding. The assumption made by many people is that the poverty of students' families causes low achievement. Invariably, though, other public schools in the same jurisdiction with a similar student population are succeeding in helping students achieve high standards.
States require a systematic approach to accountability that will help the public and officials at all levels know and assess what happens in schools and classrooms. The priority goal of accountability systems is to set expectations for high performance for all schools and to reduce and eliminate existing inequities among schools and districts so that all students have access to learning opportunities.
Educators and school reform scholars caution that the information collected for purposes of guiding actions for school improvement may be unreliable if it is also used as the basis for taking punitive action against principals and teachers. The natural human tendency is for school authorities to underreport or otherwise skew data that would put the school in a bad light and lead to sanctions against school personnel.
This dilemma of data collection might be resolved in various ways. First, we must carefully consider the purpose for each indicator. Will this information help monitor the types of education provided to different types of students or to schools in different geographic regions? Do students from poor families have the same opportunity to learn higher-order thinking and problem-solving skills as have students from affluent families? Do students in rural areas have access to technology in the classroom, compared with students in urban metropolitan regions? Descriptive information for monitoring opportunity to achieve the goals over time, as distinguished from individual school accountability, can be gleaned from a sample of schools every few years, rather than every school every year.
Indicators for school accountability that are more refined in scope might be applied only where test scores indicate poor student achievement. For these schools, we could regularly gather through teacher surveys information about the kind of instruction and curriculum teachers actually provided in the classroom and whether teachers have had the opportunity to learn new content and teaching strategies. If a series of surveys showed no positive changes in the indicators, despite professional assistance and support provided to the school, more stringent intervention could be warranted.
Second, multiple sources of data are useful to cross-check information. A comparison of the total number of students in a school or grade tested, with the number who actually took the test, might reveal large and unexplained disparities. If so, that information would raise questions about the validity of the school's results and whether all students were receiving adequate instruction.
Third, accountability systems can measure each school's continuous, annual improvement toward achieving academic and other goals, instead of comparing schools with each other.
Decisions on the purposes for which indicators are used are essential to establishing the right indicator system for accountability, as against the purposes of school improvement and general public information. Making Indicators Manageable and Understandable Any system of indicators must be kept manageable; otherwise, it will fall into disuse and create unnecessary work for those who supply the information. Each piece of information must have a clear purpose. A balance between quantity and quality of information should be achieved. Collecting too much information too frequently leaves no room for careful evaluations of the quality of instruction or professional training for teachers. Some data might be needed from every school every year, but other purposes could be served by a survey that samples schools in different regions of the state every other year. Information on school conditions must be accessible to consumers. It should be kept simple and free of jargon. In surveys, a range of responses is preferable to "yes" or "no" answers. Instead of asking principals if students have had an opportunity to write, the survey can ask how often children have writing opportunities: once a month, once a week, every day.
School report cards or other vehicles for public reporting could include guidance about how to interpret certain data, especially numbers and statistics. For example, political opinion polls report the number of people who prefer one candidate over another, based on a small sample of people questioned. When projecting those preferences to the total voting-age population, polls indicate that the results for the sample are likely to be the same for all voters within a certain range--that is, a margin of error.
Wherever appropriate, information ought to be reported in relation to the state's goals for all children, rather than reporting one school or group of schools against another. Some states, for example, are beginning to report the percentage of a school's fourth graders who have met the standard in reading, the percentage who show some proficiency, and those who have not met the standard at all; and the states provide trend data on these results.
New Indicators of School Capacity When educators and parents know what kind of learning they want for children, how can we obtain reliable information that is useful, but not burdensome, for schools to collect? Any useful analysis of a school's capacity to provide all students an opportunity to reach the learning goals requires information on three factors: inputs, processes, and results. Of the three factors governing student opportunities to achieve the goals, inputs and results are the easiest to measure. Inputs include such things as teacher characteristics (e.g., educational background, years of experience), school characteristics (e.g., safety, order and discipline, school vision, organization and management), instructional materials and resources (e.g., books, computers, amount of instructional time), and student characteristics (e.g., prior learning opportunities, parental involvement, economic situation and language abilities of students and their families, racial and ethnic background).
Results include such things as attendance and responsible actions related to school, test scores and other evidence of student performance, honors and advanced placement courses, graduation rates, and placement rates in employment and higher education.
Information about processes covers such items as student access to the full curriculum, how teachers plan and organize instruction, the quality and frequency of professional development opportunities provided to teachers, the actual learning activities in which students engage, the materials and equipment used in the classroom, and the types and frequency of school and homework assignments students receive.
What actually occurs in the classroom and school has the most immediate impact on student achievement. Parents and educators need to understand how much of the curriculum in any subject is actually taught and how it is taught to students. Are classrooms and schools conveying the knowledge and skills contained in content standards and curriculum frameworks or guides? Most districts and states have such guides, which are called the expected, or "intended," curriculum. What is actually taught is referred to as the delivered, or "enacted," curriculum.
The examples described here suggest that states and local school systems can use various methods to monitor school improvement and to inform parents, employers, and the community about the aims of education and progress toward them. Policymakers and parents want to know how many students are taking the courses that provide them access to the knowledge and skills contained in the academic content standards. Forty states currently collect data on course enrollment from all students. Course enrollment data are collected on a sample basis nationwide by the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP). NAEP is a nationwide testing program that periodically reports the achievement of a sample of students at certain ages in certain subjects. It is one indicator of the educational attainment of the nation's youth, much as the rate of inflation is one indicator of the health of the nation's economy.
Example 1: Do All Students Have Access to the Content? NAEP 1994 data show that by the 8th grade, only 20 percent of students nationwide were enrolled in algebra, while another 28 percent were in pre-algebra. By the 12th grade, only 16 percent had taken advanced math courses that are critical for technical jobs and college-level work. These results are similar to those found in the individual states. They indicate that most U.S. students have either no access to higher-level mathematics study or no motivation for it even if it is available. Similar surveys can be used to find out what percentage of students within a state or school district take various subjects. By linking these data with the statements of standards and curriculum frameworks, states have an indication of the overall expectation of what schools are providing and what students are studying.
The Delivered Curriculum Students may be taking courses that have the same name, but how do we know what skills and knowledge are actually taught in the classrooms? Examples from research are helping to answer that question. Example 2: What Kinds of Science Are Students Learning? CCSSO, in collaboration with 14 states, is developing approaches to assessing the delivered curriculum in elementary and secondary science education. The basic method is to use questionnaires for teachers and students to determine how much of the science curriculum is achieved, what skills and knowledge students have acquired, what instructional methods and materials that have been used, and how much homework is assigned. Answers to these questions provide a "window" into the classroom and can be made easily understandable to a broad audience of both educators and parents. Teachers have the opportunity to compare their own practice with that of other teachers and to judge the relative effectiveness of various instructional techniques. Parents come to understand what instruction is like, the access students have to hands-on experiments in a science laboratory, and the kind of homework that is being assigned.
Example 3: Do All Courses Teach High Standards? Somewhat similar indicators about the "enacted curriculum" are being tried out in a research project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, funded by the National Science Foundation. The purpose of the research is to look at the impact of increased standards in high school science and math on the instruction in those classrooms. High school transcripts indicate which courses students have taken, but they do not inform us about what access to knowledge those courses provided. Research was conducted in 18 high schools serving concentrations of low-income students in 12 districts in six states. Teachers in the pilot classrooms were asked to complete daily logs on the content of their instruction in a particular section of one course for a full year. They recorded such information as the specific topic of instruction (e.g., energy and electricity in physics), the kind of instruction (e.g., lectures, labwork), and the learning results expected of students (e.g., memorization, problem solving). Each week, logs were mailed to the researchers, who clarified the data when necessary and entered the responses into an electronic database.
The information from the logs yielded powerful information about students' access to learning opportunities, depending on the teacher who taught the course. One teacher, for example, might spend the entire class talking to students and expecting them to memorize facts. Another teacher takes only half the time to lecture and the other half to use pictorial models and labwork, with an emphasis on student understanding of concepts and problem solving.
Teacher logs might prove to be too labor intensive and expensive to be used on a wide scale. Researchers have learned, however, that teacher questionnaires work almost as well. Teachers can make use of this kind of information to reflect on their own practice, to understand how other teachers approach their instruction, and to grasp how their teaching relates to the knowledge and skills the science reform standards call for.
Example 4: Reaching the Goals for Mathematics and Science. Questionnaires can also be used in conjunction with in-depth case studies and videotaped observations of a small sample of classrooms, student answers to multiple-choice and open-ended questions, and an analysis of the content of textbooks for a multidimensional view of the quality of instruction, as well as its content. These methods are used by the Third International Mathematics and Science Study that was conducted in 1994 in 40 countries, including the United States. The purpose of the United States' participation in the Third International study is to measure our progress toward meeting one of the National Education Goals--that the United States will be first in the world in mathematics and science education by the year 2000.
The first analysis of the study, due in the fall of 1996, will provide insights into a wide range of information for educators and policymakers. For example, it will provide indications of effective methods of teaching science and mathematics, the scientific literacy of students in the United States compared with other countries, and the kind of educational programs related to improved student achievement in these subjects.
The methods used in this international study might be employed in schools and teacher-training institutions. In one part of the study, camcorders are used to record teaching lessons and capture practice in the "delivered curriculum." These videos enable advanced levels of analysis of teaching and learning and could be the basis of professional training and inservice training, as well as examples of comparative practice. Videos can also be useful to demonstrate to parents and the public various ways children learn.
Community Support for Achieving the Standards Ensuring school success for all children involves the financing of education at the local and state level and the use of public resources to support healthy children and strong families. To achieve ambitious new education goals, policymakers, parents, and citizens must have reliable information about how education dollars are spent and what results occur, and how the social and health conditions of children can be improved. School funding has been widely used as an indicator of whether students are receiving equal educational opportunity. If we are to make the best use of the information we have about how schools are funded, we must do a better job of clearly linking the way budgets are made up and reported, to important programmatic strategies and the indicators used to measure success. State, district, and school budgets must be presented in ways that are easily understandable to a wide audience. For three decades, controversies have arisen in courts, state legislatures, research papers, and school board meetings over disparities in expenditures per pupil in different schools, across districts within states, and among the states. In this same 30 years, real educational expenditures per pupil have increased substantially. This growth has occurred during periods of enrollment increase, as well as decline, and during periods of economic growth and recession. Even though aggregate expenditure has increased, expenditures within states may not have been adjusted to match the needs of students. Students with special needs require additional investments to ensure that we can assert that all students have the opportunity to reach the National Education Goals. The stark disparities in education spending among schools and school districts have involved the majority of states in lawsuits seeking to correct these inequities.
The discussion around ensuring student opportunity is related to equally contentious public discussions of fiscal equity in support of public schooling and the adequacy of education programs. Several state court lawsuits have addressed these latter issues. Most education equity advocates and legislators have become disillusioned with fiscal equity litigation and see suits that center on the "adequacy" of the actual education opportunity as more promising. As Paul Minorini of the law firm Hogan and Hartson has pointed out, the educational adequacy model of school reform allows the court to order increases in funding as a vehicle to improving educational and student achievement levels, rather than simply treating additional funding as an end in itself. Unlike funding equity suits, under an adequacy theory the court's involvement in education reform would not end simply when underfunded school districts receive more money. The state would need to provide more educational opportunities and improve student achievement levels to rid itself of the court's supervision. The adequacy model allows courts to supervise the schools' use of additional funding, and to ensure that the state takes responsibility for improving the educational achievement of students in deficient schools.
Minorini adds that state legislatures have found much greater public support for tax adjustments to finance remedies that are concerned with adequacy. The conception of adequacy has led to a rebirth in the 1990s of the field of school finance research and policy analysis.
Despite the attention given to education financing by the courts, public officials, and state legislatures, financial reporting and accounting systems for schools yield too little information on school programs and what expenditures make a substantial difference in student achievement. We have incomplete data about what it costs to provide all students with an education that will enable them to reach a states' academic standards. This lack of information has left educators vulnerable to the charge that money does not make a difference. Some states and districts are experimenting with new budget analyses to better understand what spending reaches students directly and to communicate complex financial information to parents and the public. States and districts are developing easily understandable reporting models to provide information about spending patterns at central offices and at each school. For example, promising reporting models break down broad categories such as "instruction" into "academic," "vocational," and even into specific subjects, such as mathematics, social studies, and physical education.
Example 5: School Budgets
The accounting firm of Coopers & Lybrand and the Center for Workforce Preparation of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have developed cost analysis models for use by individual schools. Designed for use on standard personal computers, the Finance Analysis Model organizes a school's financial information--federal, state, and local--into one report that can be readily understood by teachers, administrators, parents, business leaders, and students. The knowledge of where a school's money is spent enables principals, teachers, and parents to make more informed decisions about where resources are going and how they might be redistributed--materials, technologies, additional staff, and so forth--to improve learning. The information enables the public to have a better explanation of how tax dollars are spent, whether money is spent wisely, and how much is needed in or outside the classroom.
Conditions outside the school have a profound impact on what students learn inside the school. Healthy students who have attended preschool programs are ready to learn in the schoolhouse. Abstinence from pregnancy, smoking, and alcohol and drug use frees students to concentrate on their academic work. Community support for strengthening families enables parents to contribute to their children's learning and to school activities. Access to community services helps families prevent child abuse and neglect, find child care, obtain economic sufficiency, and enroll in adult education courses. Some states have begun to define standards for community support of children and families. They have established targets and a system of indicators by which to measure their progress in preventing conditions that lead to school failure. Health and social service agencies have joined forces with state education agencies and local school systems to coordinate information collection that indicates unmet needs. The data are also used to identify those in need and ensure that they are aware of and have access to the resources that can help them.
Much of the information needed for an indicator system is collected and reported by schools. They are the entry point for virtually every child and family in the community. Other information is tracked by county, city, and state agencies. States report the data gathered throughout the system in publications intended to bring before a broad audience reliable information on the health of a state's families and children. The Annie E. Casey Foundation has pioneered the collection of statistics on child well-being in its annual Kids Count Data Book. Many states have adopted the foundation's model by publishing a Kids Count Data Book of their own, containing a wide range of indicators of children's conditions for every county in the state. A few examples of indicators currently used by states follow:
State health departments routinely collect information on a wide range of public health indicators. Some of these are the percentage of low-birth-weight babies, the percentage of two-year-olds who are adequately immunized, rates of teen pregnancy, and adolescent drug and alcohol use.
Juvenile courts or the Division of Youth Services report the rate of juveniles in jail or on probation.
Elementary schools report the percentage of children who have had preschool experience or who are delayed in their language use.
The Bureau of the Census or the Department of Vital Statistics accounts for the number of single-parent families and the percentage of children who live in low-income families.
The research and practices that provide help with the various aspects of ensuring student opportunities are encouraging. The use of refined indicators and concepts of measuring and reporting on students and schools, however, must be considered in light of the continuing controversy about the topic "opportunity to learn" or public obligation for ensuring student opportunity to achieve the goals. The recent controversy about "opportunity to learn" has arisen from proposals to establish opportunity-to-learn standards related to content and student performance standards. In part, the controversy has been about whether national entities should deal with such standards at all, or leave them to the states and localities. The conflict has also been about keeping the focus primarily on raising expectations for student achievement and not on the means to accomplish such advances. We support challenging content and student performance standards. We recognize that if the expectations for students are increased--for more study of calculus, for example--then more teachers of calculus, more technologies and materials, and more student time for calculus are needed.
Expectations for students must be matched by student opportunity. States and localities must provide that opportunity. In so doing, they must continue to address the following difficult factors in securing equal educational opportunity for all:
Concepts of equity and fairness imply "sameness," and many people fear that sameness leads to diminished standards and expected results for students. The new debate, however, is about an equal chance for all students to achieve at much higher levels than we expected previously from most of our best students.
Standards are goals, visions, or expectations; and progress toward meeting standards must be measurable--at a minimum, at least descriptively (through indicators), if not for accountability purposes. Inevitably, every state's opportunity-to-learn strategies explicitly or implicitly will have to employ new, more sophisticated measures of input. The desired student achievement results--also measurable--clearly cannot be reached if certain fundamental learning opportunities are not first present for students. As previously stated, the old input measures of opportunity are often inadequate as predictors of student success. For example, it is now clear that teacher use of effective classroom pedagogies leads to much greater likelihood of student success than a teacher's level or even content of his or her postsecondary education. Yet some input measures, such as the ability to communicate in the language of non-English-speaking students or to use English-as-a-second-language methodologies, directly affect student achievement.
Measurement of the effectiveness of within-school teacher practices is extremely difficult. Appropriate measurement tools are still in the developmental stage. Indicators of opportunity to learn that provide descriptive information about the nature of schooling will probably be developed first, before measures that can be used for accountability purposes. Indicator data do not tell schools what they must do, but rather provide helpful information to help them identify where changes are needed.
The basic concept of opportunity to learn is considered fundamental to students' learning and having a "fair chance" of reaching high standards. Official adoption of a strategy to ensure equal opportunity immediately raises issues of both accountability and enforcement. In the past, federal and state governments have relied on largely unenforced and sometimes unenforceable written regulations as the primary vehicle for accountability. Clearly, this approach has not resulted in uniformly high-performing schools. Public officials and educators, however, have not pursued on a large scale alternative accountability strategies, such as on-site reviews and assistance by expert educators, school self-study and improvement activity, or encouragement and use of professional standards of practice. Matters of both cost and superficial design have hampered progress with such alternatives.
Historically, action to ensure educational (or other) equity has rarely come about from citizen debate and consensus alone. Correcting inequities necessitates additional expenditures or redistributing resources from the "haves" to the "have nots"--actions that are never easy. Instead, most action relating to equity is derived from the Constitution and its amendments on the protection of minority rights. Court interpretations, particularly in this century, have greatly expanded the definition of equitable treatment and benefits. They have shaped the public debate and, through our fundamental respect for law, helped build consensus that is frequently expanded by federal and state legislative action. This complex, dynamic interrelationship among public debate, court rulings, and legislative actions will continue to shape the evolution of strategies for ensuring student opportunity.
There is the usually unstated doubt about whether schools and, in some instances, whole districts can improve without outside assistance. Many state leaders know they do not have the current financial resources and personnel capacity to provide such expert help. But the debate over student opportunity may ultimately build public support for this investment. Nowhere is this more important than redirecting current resources and providing additional ones for professional development of teachers and for freeing up of time for more cooperative planning.
The depth of the controversies about ensuring student opportunity signals the reasons why these issues must command attention of each state. Together we must identify the key factors of opportunity and ensure that they are in place. These factors include: Student performance standards establish expectations for student learning. Conveying those expectations to all students is a fundamental prerequisite to creating students' opportunity to learn. School resources and practices will not, by themselves, provide the opportunity, unless all school personnel demonstrate by all their actions that they expect students to learn at high levels. These resources include appropriately prepared and qualified teachers; curriculum materials, technologies, and laboratories; and special services for students with particular needs. Such resources must be of high quality and must be used effectively. This is the most important aspect of ensuring students an opportunity to learn at high levels. To achieve this objective is extremely challenging for two reasons. First, classroom practices are hard to measure effectively; therefore, it is difficult to know whether opportunity is being provided. Second, addressing inadequacies that are found requires an investment in professional development design and operation that is rarely provided. These supports include primary prevention services for prenatal and young children and their families, parental support, extended learning opportunities, and high-quality recreational activities after school, plus other health and social service interventions when problems arise. Although this concept is not usually identified as a factor of "student opportunity," it is clear that greater student motivation is essential to achieve higher standards. Students will not engage in challenging learning if they see no positive goal from schooling, with respect to satisfaction from their learning and access to employment and further education. As CCSSO members at mid-decade take stock of educational challenges for each student, for families, communities, states, and our nation, we reaffirm fundamental commitments to students made in the past decade and focus on the tasks of analysis and implementation to meet these commitments. The terms and conditions of education have changed since 1987, but expectations and commitments are yet unmet. New levels of student achievement, with greater precision in standards and greater attention to the characteristics of effective practice, are within our reach. Our task is to seize the promise and meet the challenges before us.
Linda Darling-Hammond of Teachers College, Columbia University, summed up the challenge well in a 1993 statement: Standards that serve the cause of accountability will point the attention of both educators and policymakers to their primary tasks and will support evaluations of the extent to which important ingredients of good schooling are available to all children.
The Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) is a nationwide, nonprofit organization comprised of the public officials who lead the departments responsible for elementary and secondary education in the states, the U.S. extra-state jurisdictions, the District of Columbia, and the Department of Defense Education Activity. The Council has functioned as an independent national council since 1927 and has maintained a Washington office since 1948. CCSSO seeks its members' consensus on major education issues and expresses their views to civic and professional organizations, to federal agencies, to Congress, and to the public. Through its structure of committees and task forces, the Council responds to a broad range of concerns about education and provides leadership on major education issues.
Because the Council represents each state's chief education administrator, it has access to the educational and governmental establishment in each state and to the national influence that accompanies this unique position. CCSSO forms coalitions with many other education organizations and is able to provide leadership for a variety of policy concerns that affect elementary and secondary education. Thus, CCSSO members are able to act cooperatively on matters vital to the education of America's young people.
The CCSSO Resource Center on Educational Equity provides services designed to achieve equity and high quality education for minorities, women and girls, and for the disabled, limited English proficient, and low-income students. The Center is responsible for managing and staffing a variety of CCSSO leadership initiatives to assure education success for all children and youth, especially those placed at risk of school failure. Council of Chief State School Officers, 1996 |
last updated 8/21/2009
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