Thomas B. Fordham Institute - Advancing Educational Excellence

The State of State Standards 2006

August 29, 2006

by Chester E. Finn, Jr., Michael J. Petrilli, Liam Julian

* notes that states have updated these standards since our last review.

Two-thirds of schoolchildren in America attend class in states with mediocre (or worse) expectations for what their students should learn. That's just one of the findings of Fordham's The State of State Standards 2006, which evaluates state academic standards. The average state grade is a "C-minus"--the same as six years earlier, even though most states revised their standards since 2000.

Does this make the case for national standards? See our other new report, To Dream the Impossible Dream: Four Approaches to National Standards and Tests, to find out.

Read Chester E. Finn, Jr.'s August 31, 2006, testimony before the No Child Left Behind Commission on this topic.

Read the media release for both reports.

Contents

It Takes a Vision: California

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California: A Shock to the System 

California was a national leader in progressive education until the 1994 National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) scores showed the state mired at the bottom nationally in fourth-grade reading--tied with Louisiana and scoring below Mississippi. On the whole, California fourth-graders were more than a year behind in reading.

"Abysmal," says Michael Kirst, a Stanford education professor who had served on the state board of education in the 1970s.

"Humiliating," says Marian Bergeson, a former teacher turned Republican legislator who later became Governor Pete Wilson's education secretary.

It wasn't the first jolt to California's progressive education leaders, but it proved to be the most fatal. In 1992, the state's students had also done poorly on the NAEP exam. Apologists and cynics blamed the "M & Ms"--too many Mexicans, and too little money--and not much more was said. But the 1994 scores couldn't be passed over as easily. They made clear that the full range of California's students was falling behind the rest of the nation: One NAEP chart showed half the children of California's college graduates reading below the "basic" level.

"That single chart started all this," says Jerry Treadway, a professor of education at San Diego State University.

The NAEP earthquake had set the reform pendulum swinging with a bipartisan consensus that the progressives had led the state to academic ruin. Leading the charge was Governor Pete Wilson. He was not, however, blazing a wholly new trail.

Reform's false start

California's standards story starts in 1983, the year A Nation at Risk was published and the dynamic Louis "Bill" Honig Jr., took over as the state's elected superintendent of public instruction and head of the department of education. In his dark-horse campaign against Wilson Riles, who had served in that post for the previous 12 years, Honig called for raising standards and graduation requirements and for teaching "a core of knowledge in the arts and sciences."

It was a bold move. Prior to Honig's arrival, most California education dollars came from local property taxes, so the state had little say over how they were spent and minimal power to set standards. The decision by voters in 1978 to pass Proposition 13, which shifted education funding from local districts to the state, changed all that. And Honig, who wanted to craft new statewide standards calling for students to read literature, study classic civilizations, and develop mathematical and scientific understanding, saw his opportunity.

But having the will did not give him the capacity to overcome the progressivists who controlled the state education department and the writing of curriculum frameworks. These were people who believed that the teacher should be "a guide on the side," facilitating children's natural learning, not a "sage on the stage," teaching skills or knowledge.

"The frameworks were, mostly, here's how you teach, which wasn't that helpful," recalls Glen Thomas, who was staff director of the curriculum commission and then deputy director of the Academic Standards Commission. "Quality was uneven. The ones we did later tended to be better because we learned as we went along. History was pretty good," he remembers, because leaders such as Diane Ravitch and  Charlotte Crabtree, who stressed content over teaching methods, were involved. "But math was weak. We had kids going all the way through school and never doing algebra. They could just take general math."

The reading frameworks were especially "crappy," says Sue Burr. An education consultant in the legislature at the time who worked with state Senator Gary Hart--a Democrat who chaired the state Senate Education Committee and left the legislature in 1994 to open the Institute for Education Reform at Sacramento State University--Burr later served as Governor Gray Davis's education secretary. Whole language enthusiasts, she says, wrote a visionary reading framework in 1987 that was heavy on literature and the joy of learning, very light on phonics, spelling, and direct instruction.

The math framework didn't come until 1992, and predictably, it embraced the "new new math" ideas promulgated by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, which stressed students working in groups, solving real-world problems, and developing their own strategies instead of applying traditional algorithms. Computation drills were out, feeling good was in. Students would feel "mathematically empowered," the framework promised.

But how would anyone know if the state's newly "empowered" students were any better at math? California had no state test. In 1990, Governor George Deukmejian vetoed funding for the California Assessment Program (CAP) multiple-choice test, complaining that it didn't produce individual scores.

Honig says he realized students were foundering, but couldn't muster the political support necessary to launch a statewide test. "It could have been corrected so easily, if we'd had a state test, but we were flying blind," Honig says. "That's why NAEP was such a shock in 1994."

Honig also tried to bring back skills instruction but made little headway. Then he was
distracted by charges involving education department contracts for his wife's nonprofit foundation. Convicted of conflict-of-interest charges, he resigned at the start of 1993.

Demoralized by Honig's fall, the education department was managed for the next two years by an interim superintendent named Dave Dawson, a long-time civil servant who tried not to make waves. Inside the education department and the colleges of education, progressivism reigned supreme. But outside, even before Honig's fall, the traditionalists were gathering their forces.

Rallying Traditionalist Troops

If Honig couldn't break the back of failed progressive policies in California, others were willing to try. A remarkable array of citizens began a grassroots struggle for improved reading and math instruction.

Their spiritual leader and inspiration turned out to be Marion Joseph, a retired former aide to Riles, who spearheaded the revolt against whole-language reading in California. When she discovered that her grandson wasn't learning to read naturally, as whole-language theorists had promised, Joseph dived into the reading research literature, learned where the whole-language advocates were wrong, and became a shrewd and relentless lobbyist for the return of direct, systematic teaching of phonics.

Richard Lee Colvin, writing in The Los Angeles Times in 1995, described her as an "unpaid lobbyist" who "relies on ‘moles,' as she calls them, to tip her off to proposed policies so she can press for language that suits her purpose."

Her success is demonstrated by the "conversion" of Bill Honig to her cause. After leaving office in 1993, he became the leader of the Consortium on Reading Excellence (CORE) in 1995 as a born-again phonics man.

Joseph went to work on key legislators, persuading them that reading instruction was failing California students. "I carted research studies to legislators and the governor's office," Joseph says. "I couldn't be accused of being a right-wing nut, because I was a left-wing nut."

On the math front, parent groups were forming to fight for traditional instruction--algorithms and all. Honest Open Logical Debate (HOLD) started in Palo Alto in 1995 as a group uniting mathematicians, computer scientists, engineers, and lower-tech parents concerned about "fuzzy" math textbooks--or no books at all. Mathematically Correct, a website started by San Diego scientists, spread word of the parents' revolt across the state and eventually the country.

The Internet was critical, says Ze'ev Wurman, a Palo Alto computer scientist and HOLD member who later was named to the committee that rewrote the math framework. High-tech parents, early e-mail adopters, "could easily exchange information, cull supporting articles from regional and national press, and rally people to meetings."

Sam Ginn, then the chair of the California Business Roundtable and CEO of Pacific Telesis, shared his concerns about math education directly with Governor Pete Wilson. "A few weeks after I took office as governor" in 1991, Wilson says, "I had a call from Sam Ginn, saying, ‘We give tests for entry-level jobs to high school graduates. The exam is pegged at the seventh grade level--the math is just arithmetic, fractions and percentages and it's the equivalent for reading comprehension and writing. Two-thirds of high school graduates flunk the exam. If they're close enough, we'll do remedial instruction, but we really think it's not our job to be teaching reading and math to high school graduates.' He thought that was our job."

One response to that complaint was the creation in 1991 of a Cabinet-level position, secretary of child development and education, to rival the elected superintendent of public instruction. Wilson named Maureen DiMarco, former president of the California School Boards Association, who is best remembered for describing new-new math as "fuzzy crap."

Rise of the State Board of Education

The California state board of education, a relatively quiet group under Riles, rebelled against Honig in 1991. It sued Honig, claiming the board, not the secretary of public instruction, had the constitutional power to set education policy. It won its case in 1993.

"The appeals court ruled that the board of education was a policymaking body and the department of education was the arms and legs of the board," says Bill Lucia, who was executive director of the board at the time.

Wilson, as evidenced by his appointment of DiMarco, was friendly with the reform-minded board. Yvonne Larsen, president of the board in 1993, had served as vice-chair of the Nation at Risk panel and was a good friend of Wilson. They got to know one another in the '70s and early '80s, when Wilson was mayor of San Diego and she sat on the local school board.

Wilson wasted no time appointing assertive board members who were unwilling to take the department's lead. "I appointed Tim Draper to the board," Wilson says. "I told Tim, ‘You don't have a snowball's chance in hell of being confirmed, but you'll have a year on the board to make your case.' Janet Nicholas had guts and honesty and I knew she would hang in there. We had awfully good people who we knew would hang in."

"Wilson got serious about K-12 and took the board seriously," says Suzanne Tacheny, who directed California Business for Educational Excellence. "He died on his sword over some appointments. He was willing to fight."

The shift in power from the superintendent to the board didn't just happen, says Wilson. "It was by conscious design." Wilson wasted little time in stripping the department of its power. As mentioned, there was no statewide test before 1993 but the department's progressives were at work developing the new-fangled California Learning Assessment System (CLAS), intended to measure not learning so much as a student's psychological profile. It asked students to write about their feelings and draw pictures in response to reading passages.

Parents on the religious right railed against the exam after it was administered in 1993, complaining that questions about students' personal beliefs and experiences were an invasion of privacy. The department stonewalled its critics, dismissing them as right-wing extremists. But the criticisms leveled by statisticians hired to analyze the assessment for its technical soundness could not be so easily ignored. Their report in 1994 revealed numerous problems in producing valid scores. Moreover, CLAS couldn't provide individual student scores, a top priority for Wilson, who wanted to empower parents.

These two shortcomings gave Wilson all he needed in 1994 to veto funding for CLAS.
That debacle--the word everyone uses to describe it--did more than weaken the department politically. It clued in state officials, who had previously relied on the department of education's so-called professional expertise and ability to objectively determine what constituted best practice, that these "experts" were in fact part of the problem.

The department was further damaged in 1995 when Delaine Eastin took office as superintendent of public instruction. A Democrat who had headed the Assembly education committee, Eastin defeated DiMarco, who had decided to run for another office. Eastin tried to restore balance to the department, moving some true believers to other jobs. "The progressives in the department didn't like Delaine at all," Stanford's Michael Kirst recalls.

But neither did the governor. "Pete Wilson hated Delaine," says Kirst. "She'd made very personal attacks on Wilson when she was in the legislature and he never forgave her."
Wilson slashed the education department's budget by 25 percent, further weakening Eastin's power.

And when Eastin thought things could get no worse, they did. With no friends among the progressives inside the education department, no support from the governor's office, and no public support in the wake of the CLAS debacle, she faced the public outcry over the 1994 NAEP results, released to the public in 1995.

Yet in the face of such adversity, she scored a success, launching both the Reading Task Force and the Math Task Force to look into the state's low performance. The Reading Task Force talked with reading researchers and called for "balanced" instruction combining phonics and comprehensive strategies. Joseph was a task-force member and lobbied successfully to include systematic and explicit teaching of phonics. The battles fought here would prove helpful when Wilson launched a commission to write new standards for the state in 1995.

The Math Task Force was somewhat less successful. It, too, called for balance in instruction, but what was meant by balance was never be decided. Not surprisingly, when the math standards were written several years later, the process erupted into an all-out war.

Meanwhile, the legislature was waiting for no one. Liberal Democrats allied with conservative Republicans to pass the ABC bills in 1995, which required the state board of education to ensure that instructional materials in math and reading teach "systematic, explicit phonics, spelling and basic computational skills."

In a July 6, 1995, San Francisco Chronicle story, assemblyman John Burton explained why his bill required schools to teach spelling. "You cannot run until you walk. You cannot walk until you crawl,'' said Burton, an influential Democrat. "And what has happened in public education is we're trying to teach people how to run and jump, and nobody taught them either how to crawl or how to walk."

The ABC Bills passed the assembly without a single "no" vote. The bipartisan consensus was a tribute to Marion Joseph's aggressive lobbying and the progressives' lack of clout. The California Teachers Association had no interest in defending progressive education while the California Federation of Teachers was pro-phonics. Eastin admitted that her department had made an "honest mistake" in neglecting basic skills.

"All the players agreed K-12 was a real mess," says Nicholas, who was a Wilson appointee to the state school board. "It wasn't making anybody happy. A key moment for me was when I was driving to Sacramento and heard on the radio that John Burton--a very liberal Democrat--had passed the ABC bill saying kids should be taught to spell. I started laughing. It was like passing a bill saying people should walk."

Republicans held a slim majority in the assembly. Steve Baldwin, "the most extreme right-wing Christian legislator we've ever had," says liberal Democrat Joseph, chaired the education committee. "I told Baldwin we had to stick to reading--no school prayer. We had to stay in the box."

"Without Baldwin, this wouldn't have happened," says Treadway. "CTA controls the agenda when the Democrats are in power. The Republicans are more likely to let a public voice in. Delaine thought because she'd been chair of the education committee she could walk over there and tell them what to do. By the time she got there, Marion had it sewn up."

"Everyone was in favor of excellence by then," says Hart. "It reminded me of crime. ‘I can be tougher on crime than you.' Everyone was talking tough on education."

"The stars aligned," says Kirst. "Pete Wilson had the governor's power. The legislature was moving to the right; the Republicans gained control by one vote of one house. Honig was gone. There'd been an interim superintendent for two years, then Delaine Eastin, who didn't build any coalitions. The department of ed was beaten down."

The unions kept quiet. "This wasn't a bread and butter issue for them," says Kirst. "In terms of progressive vs. traditional, they probably had members split six ways to Sunday."

A Consensus for New Standards

By the end of 1995, Wilson, Eastin, and the legislators agreed: A new 21-member standards commission dominated by gubernatorial appointees would write rigorous, world-class, unfuzzy standards that would be used to create a new state test--one that didn't ask students about their feelings. The law required a majority of commission members to be parents with children in public school.

Victory has a thousand fathers, it's said, while defeat is an orphan. It's a sign of the success of California's standards that everyone now claims to have backed them from the beginning.

But there's general agreement that unions, education groups, and the business community went along rather than leading the charge.

The CTA wielded enormous power, Wilson says, but the CTA and the smaller California Federation of Teachers "chose not to fight standards."

"The unions were skeptical about standards at first," says Bergeson, who in 1996 replaced DiMarco as the governor's education secretary. "They worried this would be tough for teachers to absorb. Their concern was that there's never enough money for staff development. They came to support standards because it let them understand what to expect."

Joe Nunez, then a CTA lobbyist and now its assistant executive director and a state board of education member, agrees with Bergeson's analysis. "The CTA participated as one of many groups," says Nunez. "Initially, there was a hue and cry about teachers having to do the same thing in the same way on the same day." Teacher empowerment was a CTA priority. However, union leaders decided that clear standards aligned to a well-written test would help teachers do their jobs. "We think that if you set expectations and let teachers do what they need to do to meet those, that's empowering."

Like the unions, the professional associations representing school board members, administrators, and non-teaching staff were "non-players," says Scott Hill, who headed the school boards' association and became the second director of the standards commission. "I used to complain to the various associations: You think public education revolves around money. You don't understand standards and testing is going to change your life. This is going to put a spotlight on your school."

The California Business Roundtable argued that good schools were critical to California's economic health. But they didn't get into specifics of how to improve schools.

"Business was not pushing an ideology," says Thomas. "They wanted clarity, specificity, and rigor" in the standards.

In 1997, with all the players in tow, Wilson pushed through the STAR (Standardized Testing and Reporting) system. It took effect in 1998, using a nationally normalized, off-the-shelf test that produced individual scores. Wilson was adamant that parents couldn't wait any longer. In 2001, questions based on the newly crafted state standards were added.

Writing the Standards

In 1996, the standards commission went to work. The governor, the superintendent and the legislature appointed former teachers, school administrators, academics, business leaders, and a home-schooling mother--but no current classroom teachers. Later, as vacancies opened up, some active teachers were named to the commission.

Ellen Wright, an education grant writer who'd served on previous commissions, was chosen as the chairwoman. Ellen Moratti was the executive director in charge of the commission staff, replaced by Scott Hill in 1997.

The commission's first job was to hire consultants with standards-writing experience. StandardsWork, a Washington-based organization that stressed the need for clear, measurable, grade-by-grade standards, got the job. Consultants Susan Pimentel and Leslye Arsht used existing standards and frameworks as models: Virginia's Standards of Learning and the local standards employed by Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina were influential, but commissioners also looked at California models, such as the Education Roundtable standards, as well as work done in Arizona, Colorado, Delaware, New York, Massachusetts, Texas, Washington, Chicago, Hungary, Japan, and Singapore. They also considered Core Knowledge, the International Baccalaureate Program, the New Standards Project (a joint effort of the National Center on Education and the Economy in Washington, D.C., and the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh), and TIMSS.

Commissioners invited researchers to testify, though, as E.D. Hirsch Jr. pointed out in his testimony, evaluating the reliability of research was a challenge:

The enormous problem to be faced in basing policy on research is that it is almost impossible to make educational policy that is not based on research. Almost every practice that has ever been pursued in education has been supported with data by somebody. I don't know of a single failed educational policy, ranging from the naturalistic teaching of reading, to the open classroom, to the teaching of abstract set theory in third-grade math that has not been research-based. Experts have advocated almost every known educational practice short of inflicting permanent bodily harm.

Each commission member served either on the English language arts or  math subcommittee; once these were done, the commissioners went on to history/social studies and science.

"It helped that our meetings were public," says Pimentel, who took charge of English and history. "Many teachers came, and we often turned to them as we were struggling with what level of detail to include. We asked them to be a check on us."

Commissioners often asked the audience to participate. Pimentel remembers, "Trying to do all this in public was daunting, but I really felt the atmosphere was that we wanted to get it right. There was a sense of openness."

"What was good about California's process," she continues, "was the many layers of review." The draft standards were sent all over the state and the country for review. "People writing standards need to know their work will go out for review by colleagues in the field and to experts around the country. It's not just the say-so of the 10 or 20 people in the room."

"We set a process and stuck with it," says Thomas, the commission's then deputy director. "All papers were made public. There were times for public comment. I think people thought the process was fair."

Reading: Civility, Not a Civil War

To everyone's surprise, reading wasn't a fight. The battle had already been won.

"English language arts was fairly peaceful because it was preceded by the Reading Task Force, which came out with Every Child a Reader," says Jerry Treadway. A member both of the task force and the commission, and an Education professor at San Diego State University, Treadway had converted from whole language to phonics when his student-teachers said their students couldn't read. "The task force is where the blood was spilled. Marion Joseph fought to the last minute to get 'phonics' in the report and she won. When we started on the standards, Delaine came in and said, ‘We've fought this battle. It's over. Leave it alone.'"

Alice Petrossian, a deputy superintendent from southern California, was a "terrific chair" of the subcommittee, says Sheila Byrd, a commission staffer who helped write the English and social studies standards. "Alice was very inclusive. Everybody felt listened to. Some folks from the audience became almost like part of the subcommittee."

"In reading, we made it clear up front that phonics and phonemic awareness would be important in the early grades," Pimentel says.

Researchers flew in to testify about reading research, including Marilyn Adams and Louisa Moats, both leading researchers in reading instruction.

"Every standards document claims to be ‘research based,' often with no explanation of what research it's talking about," Pimentel says. In reading, "bringing in researchers helped achieve consensus" in California.

"The base of reading research was so overwhelming," Burr says. "We relied on the NIH (National Institutes of Health) research. At the ed schools, the sheep were still going to whole language," but teachers came to see the value of phonics-based, systematic reading instruction. "There was a lot of consensus."

The greatest resistance in reading came from kindergarten teachers who didn't want to see kids pushed at all at that tender age, recalls Treadway. "The teachers complained, but within a year they told us we could have made the standards more rigorous."

The commissioners emphasized reading in grades K-3, and writing in grades 4-8. There were some complaints that the high school standards were too hard, Treadway says. "People said students would need a master's degree to pass." But the commissioners, checking their work against Virginia and Charlotte-Mecklenburg, forged ahead.

Joseph, named to the state board of education by Wilson in 1997, was asked by the board to monitor English language arts along with Kathryn Dronenburg, an elementary teacher and a staunch phonics advocate. These two approved of the commission's work.

History and Social Studies: The Great Peace

Remarkably, history/social studies was also tranquil--at least within the commission.

The commissioners liked the extant history framework, written by Diane Ravitch and others when Honig was in office, and agreed to use it as a foundation. "In history/social studies, people wanted their culture represented and the wording to be correct, but there weren't rival camps," says Pimentel. "Early on we got long, very scholarly, often very angry, responses about the wording of specific items, often questioning our motives. We tried to look at the content of what they were saying to see what had merit."

"When we got to world history," she continued, "we decided it was important to look at the eastern hemisphere, but it also was very important for students to know where our system of government came from. We were able to pull in other events not just from Europe but we made a determination not to stick in everything. It's still very comprehensive and maybe there's too much to teach."

With the history framework as a guide, the subcommittee tried to resist pressure to mention every student's ethnic heritage.

"We did a lot of stressing e pluribus unum rather than multiculturalism," recalls attorney Lawrence Siskind, who sat on the committee. "The standards were sort of anti-multicultural."

Still, when the commission held hearings to talk to teachers, they heard complaints that the standards asked too much, Siskind recalls. "We were getting more excuses than constructive comments. Teachers as a group were intimidated by standards. They felt they were too high, that it wasn't practical."

Byrd still worries about sixth and seventh grade, which are "chock full of history, geography and economics, even some social history. It's a lot." The subcommittee members did their best to find a teachable balance, and finished without igniting a history war.

However, California made no provision for updating the standards, Hart points out. "Tenth grade world history is oriented to Europe. We have the Glorious Revolution, the French Revolution, very little post World War II, and nothing on terrorism, not much on Islam."

"I'm afraid to reopen the standards," Thomas says. "They could be turned into a laundry list or watered down or factionalized." For this reason, the state board of education resisted pressure in 2006 from Hindu nationalists who wanted to rewrite textbooks to change the Aryan "invasion" of the subcontinent to an "incursion," and to change the "caste system" to a "class system."

The subcommittee "was a very harmonious group," says Siskind, who served as the chair. "We had disagreements but were determined to keep discussion at a polite level. I kept telling myself, ‘This is not litigation. This is politics. I have to be nice.' On reflection, I think we were all glad we weren't in math or science."

Math Attack

The ideological fight everyone had expected over reading and history erupted over math and science instead. "Math was a war from the get-go," says Hill.

Unlike reading, where the task force set up by Eastin sorted out the differences between the progressives and the traditionalists, the Math Task Force had failed to negotiate common ground between supporters of NCTM's progressive standards and the math traditionalists.

The NCTM standards were multi-grade and sometimes vague, Pimentel says. "California decided to go grade specific and detailed. Plus there was the push to make sure students had basic skills under their belts, that algebra needs to be traditional algebra, that geometry has to have proofs in it. People thought NCTM was under attack."

The commission's firebrand was Bill Evers, a HOLD member appointed by the governor and a Research Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution. Evers is a political scientist but had developed a "math brain trust" that advised him, including math professors at Stanford, Berkeley, Oregon, and the California State University system, and HOLD members with backgrounds in statistics and biomedical research.

Evers believed strongly that children need to be taught math fundamentals before they can build conceptual understanding. He also opposed the use of calculators in elementary school. Judy Codding, a former high school principal and vice president of the National Center on Education and the Economy, became the leader of the commissioners who supported NCTM standards.

"On the math committee, we carefully examined what they were doing in Asian countries, the Czech Republic," Codding says. "Our concern was once you've acquired math skills and knowledge, how do you use that knowledge? In our country, conceptual understanding is left out of the mix. It shouldn't be either/or. You can't apply something you don't have."

Evers and Codding believed they were advocating a balanced curriculum that would include both basic skills and higher-level thinking. They wanted benchmarks tied to international standards. If kids can do it in Singapore and Japan, why not in the U.S.? But they had different ideas about how to get to "world-class."

The business community wasn't a great deal of help, recalls Hill. They wanted higher standards, but what would those look like? Evers, he continues, "had the specifics. He had a bank of advisors--mathematicians--that became an ad hoc committee that worked with the state board when they rewrote the standards."

Evers's persona carried the day at the beginning, but by the end the progressives on the commission sided with NCTM and Codding, who had the votes needed to pass a progressive agenda.

With Evers as the sole "no" vote, the commission eventually approved a set of NCTM-inspired math standards that Codding believed "could have been the best in the country."

But Evers didn't give up. A canny political scientist, he looked at where the power lay: The standards commission could recommend standards, but the state board of education had the final say. "When I noticed severe problems, I'd go to people in the governor's office. But they had plenty on their plates. So I went to members of the state board. Did they want to defend math standards with no long division?"

Evers tried to bargain with the commissioners, threatening to write a minority report unless they amended the standards. "The staff went apoplectic. They really didn't want a minority report. I had a complete alternative set of standards. It got very bitter. I think I got no votes other than my own. But I put my standards on the web and handed them out. I wrote in the New York Times and Mercury News about my views." Evers knew he'd angered the commissioners by going directly to the state board. But he didn't care.

The board agreed that the commission's standards were too fuzzy. "Teaching long division was seen as moral turpitude," says Nicholas, who was friendly to Evers's position. "Memorizing the multiplication tables was a really horrible thing to do to young minds."

The state board asked Nicholas and fellow board member Robert Trigg to "fix" the commission's standards. "I can remember making the most outlandish phone calls to people," says Nicholas. "I called a very well-known mathematician at Princeton and asked for his help. He asked me what the compensation was. I basically said, ‘Love and kisses.' We had no budget. We had minimal staff."

A team led by Stanford math professors rewrote the commission's standards, reordering them to make sure basic skills came before advanced skills, eliminating ambiguity, and fixing more than 100 errors in the original document. "They stripped it of discovery learning, and they paid attention to the content and curriculum controversies," Evers said. "They didn't use my alternate standards, but I think the standards they did are very good."

Other than banning calculators in elementary school, the board's standards didn't dictate how to teach. For example, schools had the option of teaching "integrated mathematics" rather than the traditional algebra, geometry, or advanced algebra/trig sequence. Students could learn through drill or through discovery, as long as they learned.

In a letter of protest to the board, NCTM President Gail Burrill wrote: "Today's children cannot be prepared for tomorrow's increasingly technological world with yesterday's content ... The vision of important school mathematics should not be one that bears no relation to reality, ignores technology, focuses on a limited set of procedures.''

But the progressive tide was turning. A few years later, the NCTM standards were revised to include more emphasis on foundational skills.

Science Stand-Off

After math, the subcommittee turned to science. Once again, Evers said he would go to the state board of education if he didn't get the standards he wanted from the commission. Again, the board was on his side. "Looking at what had happened with math, we knew science would be a huge battle," says Hill. And the battle began with a struggle over which consultant to hire to advise and help write the standards.

Two teams applied for job: One, led by Bonnie Brunkhorst, a California State University-San Bernardino science education and geology professor, strongly supported national standards written by the National Science Foundation and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Stan Metzenberg, a California State University at Northridge biology professor, assembled a rival team that included three Nobel Laureates, including Glenn Seaborg, former U.C. Berkeley chancellor, head of the Atomic Energy Commission, and chair of the Nation at Risk panel.

Metzenberg's team volunteered to work without pay; Brunkhorst asked for $178,000. The commission's scoring system used cost as the denominator, which should have guaranteed a Metzenberg victory. Instead, however, the Brunkhorst team was chosen on grounds that its members had more experience writing standards. When Metzenberg complained, Hill conceded the rules hadn't been followed. While the commission revamped the scoring system and repeated the process, Metzenberg recruited more Nobel Laureates and Brunkhorst recruited a few of her own. A battle of the Nobels was raging.

"I could see this was going to get really ugly really fast," Hill says. "I talked to Ellen Wright and Bill Evers and said, ‘I think we should force both groups to work together. We can find that neither meets the sufficiency hurdle.' I did this knowing my life would be hell working with these people and it was a miserable experience, just wretched. Our job was to force them to talk to each other."

When Larry Stupski, a Charles Schwab vice president, resigned from the commission, his seat had to be filled. Wilson appointed Seaborg and made him chair of the science subcommittee. Roland Otto, a nuclear physicist who'd been a Seaborg protégé, resigned from Brunkhorst's group and became the facilitator, acting as a go-between linking Seaborg and the two teams of consultants.

Metzenberg, suspicious at first, came to trust Otto's ability to "see both sides." Brunkhorst, however, saw Otto's resignation as betrayal. The two teams worked side by side without establishing trust or respect for each other. A draft might have one color for Brunkhorst suggestions, another color for Metzenberg's language. The split document went to the commission.

Brunkhorst was amazed and angered by the commission's refusal to accept AAAS standards based on student inquiry. Metzenberg, focused on content, opposed a separate strand for investigations and experimentation. "I was never worried students wouldn't get lab experience and hands-on activities. I thought it was important they actually know something at the end of the lab experience."

The commission's standards stuck to one verb, "to know."

Brunkhorst cites that as a failing. "They never say ‘understand and be able to use it.' They just say ‘know.'"

For Metzenberg, simplicity is a virtue. "Other state standards pulled out Bloom's taxonomy: They use ‘to understand, interpret, analyze' . . . nobody knows what that means. We just use ‘to know.' Ours are easy to write test questions for, very precise and straightforward."

The subcommittee looked at Virginia's Standards of Learning as well as overseas at India and elsewhere. "We looked at countries that haven't fallen into the trap of fuzzy education," Metzenberg says.

The American Federation of Teachers' reports on what college-bound students abroad are expected to know in chemistry, physics, and biology proved helpful. The AFT printed the Tokyo University entrance exam, the British A-level exam, and Germany's Abitur, including what percentage of students attempted the test and what percentage passed.

"Developmental appropriateness" became a battle. Brunkhorst believed children could be confused and frustrated by being exposed to concepts they're not ready to understand. Metzenberg saw no harm in exposing children to ideas that might be a stretch.

"In kindergarten we said they should know that water evaporates from an open container but not from a closed container," Metzenberg says. "It suggests a nice experiment. Bonnie said psychologists have found kids that young have no concept of water as a gas. It would case them stress and harm to try to learn that. My friends joked that California needs an open container law to protect children from harm."

"People try to ignore developmental psychology," says Brunkhorst. But "it does more harm than good to be exposed to the periodic table in third grade."

Seaborg wanted the periodic table--element 106 was seaborgium--on the wall in elementary school to prepare students to learn more in high school. It became a symbol of high expectations.

Brunkhorst's team focused on the lower grades, while Metzenberg started in high school and worked backward. They met in middle school, which became "a huge train wreck on content," Metzenberg says. "Bonnie was arguing students couldn't learn a lot of content in fourth and fifth grade so the content built up in middle school."

Seaborg pushed for more content in the early grades. Other commissioners didn't want to set low standards that might become the ceiling, but also feared setting high standards that would be unreachable.

The compromise was to put an asterisk by standards that only advanced students would be expected to learn.

Metzenberg was pleased with the result; Brunkhorst says only that the science standards ‘could have been a lot worse.'"

When it came to a vote, Seaborg abstained, complaining that too much had been asterisked. But he autographed a copy of the periodic table for Hill.

When the board accepted the standards, progressives protested once again. Luther Williams, the NSF program officer, wrote a letter saying the foundation would stop funding education grants in California.

The board didn't waver. The threat proved to be empty.

Classroom teachers like California's math and science standards, Pimentel says. As she goes around the country consulting on standards, she brings models from other states as a base to build on.

"I bring California science standards along, as well as Indiana, and more often than not they like the clarity and focus of California--and they really like Indiana--even though they know and like NSF and AAAS. While the battle may rage outside, the teacher in the classroom is able to look at these different renditions and put them together in a way that makes sense."

California's standards aren't a compromise, Kirst says. "California turned very traditional in reaction to what had happened before. One side won over the other: That's what makes the California standards so strong. You don't have a lot of mush."

* * *

California's abysmal NAEP showing in the early 1990s created an environment friendly to reform. But that wasn't enough; shrewd political leaders such as Governor Wilson also made tactical decisions--such as strengthening the state board of education and weakening the superintendent of public instruction--that eventually proved critical. Most important, intellectual leaders and advocates such as Marion Joseph, Bill Evers, and Glenn Seaborg fought like hell to make sure the standards came out right and didn't stop until they won.

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