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: Indiana

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Indiana: Clear, Concise, and Jargon Free

Once upon a time, an Indiana teenager could leave high school for a factory job and earn more money than his teachers in his first week. He could work on the family farm without tracking global markets or environmental regulation.

By the 1990s, however, high-wage, low-skill manufacturing jobs were gone and farming had gone high-tech. To earn a decent living in a factory or farm or almost anywhere else, Indianans needed far more education.

"Employers complained that they were giving tests for entry-level jobs, and out of 50 people they'd only get 10 who could be considered because of the lack of reading skills," says Sue Scholer, a Republican who served on the House education committee. "When the steel mills closed, a lot of those workers couldn't be retrained. They were illiterate."

Business leaders feared Indiana would be stuck in the Rust Belt if it didn't start competing with other states--and countries--to produce a skilled workforce. They had reason to fear. In 1986, the legislature approved the A+ bill, which mandated the Indiana Statewide Testing for Education Progress (ISTEP) exam. The failure rate was high. Parents grew outraged as children who did pass the exam and enter college found themselves taking remedial courses just to stay afloat. Higher education leaders seconded their cries, noting that the remedial burden on them was only growing.

Indiana's requirements for a high school diploma were the weakest in the country, says Cheryl Orr, a higher education commission staffer who became leader of "the standards gang." "Our college-going rates were dismal. Families didn't think college was needed."

"The standards movement here came from the sense that Indiana had to turn the corner," says Teresa Lubbers, Republican chair of the Senate Education Committee. "In Indiana, we only change out of a sense of crisis."

In 1997, led by the Chamber of Commerce, state business leaders proposed that the legislature create a roundtable to discuss what kids need to succeed. The legislature wouldn't bite, in part because it was under the sway of the Indiana State Teachers Association (ISTA), which had no interest in pursuing a reform agenda.

The state board of education wasn't interested, either. It "wasn't an aggressive group," says Republican Brian Bosma, now speaker of the House, who worked on the A+ education reform bill that created the state testing system. "The board was captive to the vested education interests--to the union and the bureaucracy. They weren't interested in change, just getting more money in the system."

O'Bannon's Charge

Governor Frank O'Bannon understood what the business leaders, parents, and professors were worried about. And, unlike the education establishment, he took a decisive step to reform the state's ailing K-12 system. He created a 29-member advisory group, an action permitted by the legislature, called the Education Roundtable. O'Bannon, a Democrat, worked with Superintendent Suellen Reed, a liberal Republican, and Higher Education Commissioner Stan Jones, a former Democratic legislator who'd been defeated by Reed for the superintendent's job. They gathered together all the players: educators, legislators, business leaders, union leaders, and parents.

Early in 1999, a series of national reports ranked Indiana's academic standards as among the worst in the country, says Derek Redelman, who worked for the Hudson Institute and then for CLASS and ended up at the Sagamore Institute. "Our English standards were the worst in the country, according to the Fordham [Foundation]," says Redelman. But some in the state were still in denial. "The Indianapolis Star ran a story saying, 'Oh no, that's not true. We're the best.'"

A year after the Education Roundtable was created, O'Bannon pushed a law through the legislature giving the group official status with the job of developing standards and tests.

"There was a Democratic governor and House, and a Republican Senate," says Dan Clark, ISTA's standards specialist. "Because of the power split, nothing got done. ISTA and the Chamber of Commerce didn't agree on anything. They felt fulfilled in disagreeing. O'Bannon got interested in the national movement for standards and wanted to do something in Indiana. It was clear you couldn't get anything done without bringing people together."

"We'd had a very bad legislative session," says Scholer, who became one of four legislators on the Roundtable. "People were at each others' throats." O'Bannon and Reed got ISTA, the principals' and superintendents' groups, the Chamber, and the Manufacturers Association to sit down together. "The people at the table were leaders, not lobbyists," Scholer says. "Reed and O'Bannon came to every Roundtable meeting. They didn't send underlings."

The Roundtable met every month. "When we started, there was very little trust," says Orr. "People hadn't talked to each other in a long time. They were playing the blame game."
"It took 18 months before everybody became comfortable about putting controversies on the table and talking it through," says Scholer.

"When the Roundtable started, educators were suspicious and resistant to having a policy board with so much business representation," says Kevin Brinegar, president of the Indiana Chamber of Commerce. "We had battles over the cut scores on ISTEP. By and large, business folks prevailed on cut scores. Educators realized we were a force to be reckoned with. We got beyond ‘just give us more money' to ‘OK, we know you're not going away so let's talk.' We moved to much more collaboration, a more constructive relationship."

Eugene White, then superintendent of Washington Township and now of Indianapolis, credits O'Bannon and Reed for creating an atmosphere where people could disagree without insulting each other. "They emanated courtesy and respect. These were nice, Indiana-bred people. It was hard to be mean around them."

While the governor and the superintendent ran the roundtable, "Stan Jones was the man behind the curtain," White says. "Cheryl Orr and Stan Jones set the table and set the agenda. They're very good puppet masters. They created an agenda that didn't leave a lot of time for discussion and dissent. There was too much to do."

When disputes did break out, says White, "Stan was the mediator. He put out fires."

"Politically, the roundtable was made up more of educators and people in the system," says Pat Kiely, a former legislator who became Indiana Manufacturers Association (IMA) president. "Business could be outvoted two to one. But nobody wanted to endorse standards that the business community said were no good."

ISTA "did not go negative," says David Shane, who's now an education aide to Governor Mitch Daniels. "They had a seat at the roundtable and were part of the conversation. It was an oddly collaborative process."

Accountability + Money = Standards

All the roundtable members agreed that Indiana needed tougher graduation requirements, which became known as the Core 40, as well as new academic standards.

"A lot of frustration and infighting preceded the Roundtable," says Jones. "We started where we thought we might be able to find consensus, the standards."

Teachers wanted clarity, says Judy Briganti, president of ISTA. "Before we had vague proficiency statements. It was difficult for me as a fourth-grade teacher to see what students should know. The proficiency statements weren't aligned to the tests, so the tests just came out of the blue."

The union also wanted more funding to help schools reach higher standards. The business community was willing to negotiate. "Business was willing to support more funding with the standards and accountability in place," says Brinegar. "It would have been much more difficult without the money."

Reed and Jones created a group of standards writers, led by Cheryl Orr, that met every two weeks and reported to the Roundtable. The first job was to look at what Indiana already had: Vague, wordy, inconsistent "proficiency guides" that covered multiple grades and focused on what teachers should do, not what students should learn. It was impossible to use the proficiencies to measure progress.

The proficiencies were "loaded with such spongy benchmarks as a student should be able to ‘show a positive attitude toward language,'" wrote Dave Smith, a Gannett reporter.

"We had to be brutal with ourselves, willing to look at the good, the bad and the ugly," says Orr. "At the beginning, we knew we needed improvement, but we didn't realize how much. Some thought we could just tweak the proficiencies. No. It was a significant amount of work."

"Clear, precise, and jargon free" became the mantra of the standards gang.

"We had to abandon the priestly language we'd always used," says Dorothy Winchester, education department program officer and standards gang member. "If we said our goal was for children to be ‘making meaning,' what did that mean?"

The old proficiency guides had been mailed to district offices. "We'd visit schools and see the proficiencies in their shrink-wrap on top of a cabinet," Reed says. She wanted the new standards to be so useful that people would be motivated to read them.

"Some people wanted one set of standards for teachers and another set to show to parents," Reed says. "I said, ‘no, no, no, no.' We sent copies of the standards home in the fall. They're written so parents and even students can read them and understand them. We put them up on the web."

The roundtable decided that specific standards would be more helpful to teachers. "Before we had grade clusters: fourth through sixth, second through fourth. But people don't teach like that. They teach grade 5, not grade 4, 5, and 6," says Jones.

Researchers were invited to talk to the Roundtable. "We had Kati Haycock of Education Trust in to talk about disaggregating scores," says Scholer. "Everybody was getting the same information from people with expert knowledge so everybody was on the same page."

The Roundtable looked at NCTM standards, standards in other states, NAEP, TIMSS and the Baldrige continuous improvement model used in North Carolina.

Committees of teachers wrote and reviewed standards.

"Part of the reason our standards are good is that they are written by classroom teachers," Lubbers says.

"So many teachers were involved that almost everybody knew somebody who was part of the process," Reed says. It helped create buy-in.

At first, teachers were resistant, says Reed. "A fourth-grade teacher who's developed a spectacular unit on butterflies doesn't want to give that up because it's a third-grade standard." But the standards let teachers focus on how to teach.

More and more teachers came over, Winchester says, when they realized the virtues of knowing what was going to be taught when.

For teachers in inner-city or rural schools, the standards were daunting, says Winchester. "With the publication of the first draft of the standards, teachers said, ‘My kids could never do this.' They didn't believe their kids were capable. But the standard of what's good has to be the same across the state."

That's important for parents in low-income communities, says Rogers. In 34 years as a K-6 teacher in Gary, "I never paid attention to what the state had to say. It was all decided locally." State mandates sent from Indianapolis would go to the principal's office, nicely shrink wrapped, and never be seen again by teachers. "Now all kids get taught the same thing across the state. That resonates well with parents. Third graders in Gary have the same standards as third graders in rich communities like Munster."

The first draft was vetted by teachers across the state. The "standards gang" also talked to professors to make sure that students who passed high school chemistry, for example, would be ready for college chemistry.

Outside Validation

It wasn't enough to reach consensus within Indiana. Business insisted on external validation to make sure the standards were competitive, says Shane. "Having outside advice relieved us of the need to fight among ourselves about what was adequate. We weren't trying to be the first in the country. We just wanted to do the right thing."

The Chamber of Commerce paid the academic experts who carried out the Fordham Foundation reviews to evalute the first draft of the standards. Chris LaMothe, a Chamber and Roundtable member, showed the report to Jones. "Fordham gave us a B+ and an A. So I felt pretty good," says Jones. "Chris said, ‘Shouldn't we get an A in both?' So the Roundtable hired Fordham and then Achieve to evaluate our work. Fordham was not, however, involved in writing these standards. We looked at some standards that were fuzzy, not very concise and couldn't be tested. We tried to learn from those, but Achieve and Fordham best represented where we wanted to go," says Jones.
"We thought we'd done a good job on the standards," says Reed. "But Achieve told us, ‘You need more rigor.' So we looked at that."

Sandra Stotsky, fresh from working on English/language arts for Massachusetts, was hired to evaluate the Indiana English standards through several stages of development. "Before their reform effort, Indiana had some of the worst standards in the country," Stotsky notes. "It was things like: ‘Children should love to read.' Is this a standard? It has to be measurable." In the end, Indiana "came up with a fantastic document," she says. "Indiana piggybacked off California and Massachusetts, but they didn't just clone. They wrote it themselves."

Sheila Byrd, with experience as a staffer on California's standards commission, was also hired by Achieve to help Indiana benchmark its standards to other states and to international standards. "They had a huge, unwieldy set of expectations," she says. "We held up California as a benchmark."

"Early on, Stan Jones and others realized we were not going to get better unless we expanded our views," says White, the now-superintendent of Indianapolis. "We turned to Achieve, the Education Trust, and others. We had a sense you had to know what was going on in the rest of the country. We were not into education trends. We stayed focused on outcomes, preparing kids to go to college."

The gang also consulted AAAS's Science Project 2061, the International Center for Leadership in Education, and a group of history educators. "For each of the content areas, we had at least two outside national groups plus our own people," Orr says. "We opened ourselves to scrutiny."

Outside experts didn't always understand classroom challenges, White says. "We had to make sure that people with a theoretical understanding of standards understood what was going on in the classroom, getting them to see what was real and what was memorex." But outside perspectives proved valuable. "I'm in the forest looking at trees. The outside experts are at a higher level seeing my forest and lots of other forests."

Indianans are free of the not-invented-here attitude, says Sue Pimentel of StandardsWork, who consulted with the Roundtable on aligning the test to the standards. "Indiana people ask for advice, listen, and then move forward understanding that they can go back later and make improvements if they need to; they don't sit and wring their hands for five years. They don't need to wait till everything's perfect. They're very open to advice. And they have fun. They're some of my favorite people to work with."

"We didn't have to have our names on it," Reed says. "You get more done if you give everybody credit. "

Ongoing Work

Indianans continue to refine their standards and to work on aligning them with ISTEP, which Indiana students must pass to graduate from high school. The process promises to be as demanding as establishing the original standards.

"In math, teachers break it down into little pieces so students can understand but we're afraid we're losing the big concepts," Orr says. As in other states, English and math are crowding out other subjects, largely due to NCLB requirements.

Social studies educators," according to a state education official, "are begging for assessment. Because so much hinges on reading and math, they're afraid that if their subject isn't tested, it won't be taught."

"We superintendents realized we had to have standards," says White. "Our concern was why so many? Can we teach all of these? We needed standards to give us some sense of uniformity across the state but how many standards and what would be significant on ISTEP."

Indiana is now consulting with StandardsWork on developing a list of essential "power standards."

"We're trying to distinguish between power standards you must teach, those you should teach and those that are nice to teach if you have the time," White says. "It's not possible to teach everything."

Jones agrees that the challenge now is to set priorities. "Critics of our proficiencies said they were a mile wide and an inch deep. Now we're half a mile wide and two inches deep. It's dramatically better than what we had before, but we have to address the mantra that all standards are equal. That's not true. What are the big concepts, not just 50 little ideas? You're a fourth grade teacher with four subjects plus gym and art and more than 200 standards. What do you do?"

Jones says, "The good news is that the standards are out there and teachers are teaching them. The bad news is they're taking them too literally. But it's better than where we were. The standards are out of the shrink wrap."

* * *

Unlike California and Massachusetts, Indiana managed to develop great standards without the process turning acrimonious. Perhaps this is due to Indiana's courteous culture, but it is also explained by the extraordinary leadership of people such as Governor O'Bannon, Suellen Reed, Stan Jones, and Cheryl Orr. They managed to enlist the state's teachers as part of the process while keeping control of the reins. Most importantly, Indiana officials were willing to learn from other states and outside experts, and were not satisfied until their standards were among the best in the nation. The challenge that awaits Hoosiers is to create comparable assessments and accountability systems.

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