I think we find that Goals 2000 also offers important support when it's used in a way to promote the systemic reform agenda. It's money and in many cases, added legitimacy. It may not be so great, intellectually or from a coherence point of view because what it does is it multiplies all these voices around the idea of standards and sometimes around the specific standards themselves. One of the most interesting things we found is that in twenty of the twenty five districts that were developing their own standards, the state was just one source of the standards that they were using. This is not surprising.
Districts are often out ahead and they take from the state and then add on and do what they want to.
But in many of the districts we saw them drawing from multiple sources for developing their own standards and approaches to standards-based reform and this does not necessarily coherence make. Five, an additional reason to worry about the coherence of emerging standards documents and the reform process is the trend toward adding the basics back into state standards. This is certainly true of assessment too, adding multiple choice items back in. Six, early on in the standards reform movement, those of us who were watching it all noticed how overwhelming the work load is. Policy was expected to perform multiple changes not just the same time but in a coordinated way and all this learning at all the levels of the system.