Working together to achieve their common goals of school improvement, principals and teachers can accomplish a great deal. When parent involvement becomes a mutual program goal, and parents, educators, and administrators work together as a team, then true school reform will result. The following graphs show the results of surveys and focus groups done on behalf of the Education Commission of the States, in order to provide insights into how school districts can best communicate about reform. The graphs illustrate how participants reacted to the statements provided. There is considerable debate about whether the United States should establish national, state, and local standards for what students should know and be able to do as a result of their schooling.
Supporters see standards as a way of improving our schools by providing targets at which to aim.
Critics see standards as a step toward a national curriculum and testing program that would usurp local control and weaken community efforts to improve education. Performance standards describe the levels of competence or proficiency expected for satisfactory or exemplary performance. Delivery standards describe a school's capability to provide students with opportunities and resources to reach high performance standards. These definitions allow educators, school board members, parents, and students to speak the same language when discussing the merits of educational standards. Students will know what they need to learn to reach their goals, and the public will have a more accurate means to judge the effectiveness of their schools.