National and state politicians on a bipartisan basis have adopted education improvement as a high priority. Public Agenda, a nonprofit nonpartisan public opinion research group, conducted polls from 1994-97 that demonstrate strong public support for higher academic standards and more demanding expectations of students. Politicians are gravitating to the logic of establishing clear expectations for high-quality teaching and high levels of student learning, measuring progress, and holding all parts of the education system accountable for results. This, they argue, will result in school improvement. Detractors of standards-based reform emphasize the drawbacks of insufficient public school resources and resource disparities among schools.
Educators are all too familiar with the innovation du jour, here today and gone tomorrow.
Standards-based reform could be regarded as just one more. The challenge is to get started and to be practical. The real issue is whether kids in rural and inner-city schools will be challenged and enabled to achieve at the same high levels as their best suburban counterparts. School staffs devoting limited attention to standards-based reform may find that their student achievement results do not stack up with those of schools that devote additional resources to standards use. Consequences can be serious.