Standards Based Reforms — What Research Says

The United States has seen a number of ‘standards based reforms’ over the past 20 years or so. Many of these deal with school mathematics, though a few of us in the college environment have worked towards a similar process. The most recent effort is the “Common Core Standards” (http://www.corestandards.org/ ), which is the highest profile effort yet.

The Rand Corporation published a report, in 2008, called Standards-Based Reform in the United States: History, Research, and Future Directions (online at http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/reprints/2009/RAND_RP1384.pdf).  I was impressed by some of their observations.

First, “Standards Based Reform” is usually implemented as “Test Based Reform”.  The point here is that content and pedagogy reflects a testing emphasis such that the actual standards are secondary — the tests (such as those used for No Child Left Behind, NCLB) take on the primary importance.  Behind this is a tension you will understand: Standards, by themselves, produce very little change.  “Aligning” testing to the standards is very common, and very understandable, as a method to create change.  Change is not always progress, however.

Second, high-stakes testing with sanctions ‘distorts’ teaching practice; as you’d expect, teachers focus more on preparing for the test when there are sanctions involved.  In general, most of the current testing involves sanctions of some kind such as NCLB or state-level impacts.  Since tests must, by design, address small subsets of the larger domain of knowledge described by the standards, the result tends to produce students who can perform better on the tests connected to the sanctions compared to other measures of their knowledge.  Specifically, they do not do relatively as well on our college placement exams. 

Third, the report goes back to a critical document that describes 4 categories of standards … and also analyzes the track record of some specific efforts.  A shot blog post is not an appropriate venue to report on these comments (I don’t want to inflict a journal-length article on you 🙂 ).

Although community colleges have not faced the standards based reforms and tests with sanctions directly, we deal with the consequences of these efforts.  Some policy makers assume that the “developmental math problem” will go away once the standards are implemented (like the Common Core).  The Rand analysis provides some insight into why the problem is not that simple; we should assume that our problem might change in the next 10 years … not that it will go away.

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