"Assessment and accountability are tools, not sanctions, to be used as we move to improve teaching and learning for all students."

Christopher T. Cross,
CBE President, 23 Apr 2001

Professional Development

Standards & Achievement

Professional Development

Article Summary

Biography

Ed Issues

German Studies

Grad Classes:
Final Projects

Grad Programs

Professional Bks

Standards

Teaching Creed

Thematic Refs

Web Goals

First, I will provide a brief description, web addresses and links to some excellent websites on Language Arts and/or Reading Standards.

Second, I will provide a few articles about the role and purposes of standards and their impact on our students.

Third, I will provide the Standards texts for grades and classes which support Language Arts and Reading.

Language Arts and/or Reading Standards Websites

Idaho Department of Education
http://www.sde.state.id.us/Dept/
The  released Draft II of its proposed exiting standards for high school students in October 1998 as a huge, 2+ meg Adobe Acrobat file. Additionally, an Exiting Standards Committee page provides links to a mission statement, a definition of "exiting standards," and several lists of meeting dates. The department's web site also has Scope and Sequence Guides for K-6 arts, health, language arts, math, physical education, science, and social studies as self-extracting Word Perfect documents

Center for the Improvement of Early Reading Achievement.  http://www.ciera.org
The Center offers summaries and full-text Adobe Acrobat versions of research reports, some of which deal with standards and frameworks. One report on "Standards for Primary-Grade Reading" examined state frameworks. It made several significant recommendations including one that they should be more informative, draw upon current research, and recognize the complexity involved in properly implementing standards-based frameworks.  It recently offered a conference on: Early Literacy Instruction for Children at-Risk: Research-based Solutions.

National Research Center on English Learning and Achievement.
http://cela.albany.edu
The Center, based out of the State University of New York at Albany and in collaboration with the University of Wisconsin-Madison, offers information (including some research reports) dealing with different methods of language instruction. It has placed some of its research reports online while others may be ordered from ERIC. Several reports deal with assessment and, indirectly, standards. While the amount of material concerning standards and frameworks is small, the reports are also worth looking at in the own right.

National Council of Teachers of English
http://www.ncte.org/
The Council has a selection of resources dealing with the NCTE/IRA Standards for the English Language Arts. These include a list of the twelve ELA standards, selections from the organization's book about standards, and a link to a discussion forum. On a different part of its site, the NCTE lists excepts from the Guidelines for the Preparation of Teachers of the English Language Arts. (Both documents can be downloaded as Adobe Acrobat documents.) An online catalog lists numerous books that deal with standards

International Reading Association.
http://www.reading.org/ + w.reading.org/standard.htm
The International Reading Association has an IRA Standards Activities page containing a brief history of the IRA/NCTE Standards for English Language Arts, a list of the core beliefs underlying the standards, and ordering information.

Purpose of Standards and Impact on Students

READING FADS ZAP STANDARDS IN CLASSROOMS
By Jeffry L. Flake
The Arizona Republic, November 10, 1996

When President Clinton recently announced a plan to ensure that every child in public schools "can read by the third grade," I'm sure my reaction was the same as parents everywhere.

"Third grade?"

What, pray tell, does the president suggest that children be doing in the first and second grades? Sadly, the president's lack of confidence in the ability of the nation's public schools to teach children to read is well-placed.

Recent information from the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP) shows that only 34 percent of nation's 12th-graders are "proficient" readers. Only half of the nation's fourth-graders and only 31 percent of eighth-graders can even read at a "basic" level.

Moreover, reading trends are down, not up. If these trends continue, we are just a few decades away from being accurately described as a nation of illiterates.

How did we get to this point? A flier sent home from kindergarten in my daughter's backpack offers a few clues.

Apparently tired of answering parental questions one by one about the perceived lack of focus on reading skills, a written response had been prepared under the heading "When Do You Teach Reading?"

Since I would surely be accused of taking quotes out of context if I paraphrased the flier's contents, I offer the unedited text below:

--> When a child has the chance to hear poetry and one good story after another, day after day.. . . They are being taught to read!

--> When their year is a series of mind-stretching, eye-opening, eye-filling trips. . . helping them know more solidly about their world. . . They are being taught to read!

--> When a child hears good adult language: when they have the fullest, freest chance to use their own language. . . They are being taught to read!

--> When they create with blocks; communicate with paint. . . use their body freely as a means of expression. . . They are being taught to read!

--> When a child stares - fascinated at a picture or looks every so carefully at a scale in a store or at the life in his aquarium. . . They are being taught to read!

--> When they hammer ever so carefully at the workbench, fashioning their battleship. . . They are being taught to read!

--> When they use their whole body; two eyes, two hands, two arms, two legs, and knees and feet to pull themself (sic) up a scary slanted climbing board. . . They are being taught to read!

This method of instruction, with little emphasis on instruction, is most often described as the whole-language approach to learning.

Under this approach, drills are out, spelling is ignored and phonics is a four-letter word. Over the past several years whole language has become the scourge of public education nationwide, leaving a generation of illiterates in its wake.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in California, where for a decade the whole-language approach to reading (known there as "joyful reading") was embraced with abandon. Now, with reading scores abysmally low, California's top education official, Superintendent of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin, confessed that they goofed, noting, however, that the wholesale abandonment of reading basics was an "honest mistake."

Honest mistake or not, millions of children will be paying the price for decades to come, if not a lifetime. The antidote to illiteracy in our public schools is not, as President Clinton advocates, another federal program.

The antidote is competition, and it is already beginning to work in states that have allowed it.

In Arizona, parents in one rural school district had been fighting for years for options to the whole-language curriculum.

The district steadfastly refused. It was only after a charter school moved in next door and promptly signed up more than one-third of the elementary school's 600 students, that the district agreed to offer alternatives. Parents attending the district school can now choose among four instructional approaches.

With 118 charter schools in operation, the same scenario may soon be played out all over Arizona. The reason Johnny can't read today is not because we haven't invested sufficiently in public education, or because of a lack of federal attention to the issue.

The reason Johnny can't read is that we have allowed the public schools to latch on to every new instructional fad that promises results without associated effort, (fads that would have us believe that children learn to read by using all of their extremities to scale a "scary slanted climbing board") without allowing parents an escape hatch with which to hold the schools accountable. Our failure to allow competition in public education thus far is a mistake that we can no longer countenance.

When a child doesn't learn to read, life itself is destined to be one big scary slanted climbing board. Our children deserve better.

[Note: The following article appeared in the February 17, 1997 issue of the Insight, as an affirmative response to the question, "Do public schools need state-mandated educational standards?"]

Demanding Excellence in Public Education
Setting Academic Content Standards

by Christopher T. Cross and Scott Joftus

Council For Basic Education:
http://www.c-b-e.org/articles/yesstand.htm

With standards so well accepted in our society, why are they so resisted in education?

Standards are everywhere. Federal standards protect the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the medication we take. Radio, TV, and pilots and planes are all subject to federal standards. Automobile mechanics, veterinarians, lawyers, plumbers, and even hairdressers and barbers must meet standards set by states.

Why do we have standards in these and other areas? As a society, we are dedicated to maintaining excellence in the resources and services we depend on; we want to hold government and business accountable for ensuring our high quality of life. Why then, are we willing to accept an education system that has no publicly accepted standards?

It seems that we expect but do not demand a great deal from public education. We hope that it provides the knowledge and skills students need to become productive members in the workforce and in our democracy. We would like public education to convey a sense of what it means to be American. And we would be pleased if public education were to develop students' appreciation for culture and ideas. But how do we know whether students are learning what they need? How do we help students and schools to improve? How do we ensure that no student is left behind?

Academic standards -- statements that describe what all students should know and be able to do by the time they reach specified grade levels -- address these questions in four important ways. First, standards set clear, high expectations for student achievement. Second, they provide a basis to hold educators and students accountable. Third, standards promote educational equity by demanding that all students achieve at high levels. Finally, they help guide efforts to measure student achievement, improve teacher training, develop more effective curricula and instructional strategies, and allocate resources more efficiently.

In the absence of academic standards, academic content is shaped by publishers of textbooks and tests. Many educators have concluded that this content is trivial and superficial. Their opinion is supported by the largest international study of student achievement ever taken, the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) in 1996. The study compared the mathematics and science achievement of eighth-grade students from 41 countries and analyzed each of the countries' curricula, textbooks, and teaching. American students performed slightly better than average in science and below average in mathematics. The authors of the study warned that lack of a coherent vision of how to educate U.S. students in mathematics and science resulted in unfocused curricula and textbooks that failed to define clearly what is intended to be taught.

Academic standards provide students, teachers, and parents a clear set of objectives for what students should know and be able to do at various points of their educational careers. For example, one math standard might state: By the end of fourth grade, all students will be able to add, subtract, multiply, and divide fractions. Students would have a concrete goal to work towards, and teachers would have a framework for developing curricula and assessments that accurately measure student achievement. Parents would have an understanding of the specific goals their children are working toward, which would allow them to increase their participation in the learning process. Finally, future employers and the American public in general would have a clearer sense of the expectations for students of different ages.

Without standards, citizens cannot know whether students are learning essential material because no one can specify what that material is. Similarly, the public cannot know whether a school's educational program is effective, because there is nothing against which it can be measured.

This lack of accountability has eroded the public's faith in public schools: A 1995 survey found that almost half of Americans now believe that it is possible to get a high-school diploma without learning even the most basic skills. Many teachers agree there is a problem, but, interestingly, in a recent survey conducted by the American Federation of Teachers, 44 percent of teachers said that they promoted undeserving students because there were no standards to hold them accountable.

Refusing to hold students accountable for learning sends the message to children that they need not work hard or learn essential information and skills; it allows schools to ignore the needs of failing students; and it detracts from the value of a high-school diploma. With standards, schools have a basis to measure student achievement, an objective measure against which students can be assessed to determine whether they need greater assistance before moving on to the next grade. Standards also provide the basis for the public to assess the effectiveness of schools in preparing students to meet explicit goals.

Low-income students who do not perform well in school appear to suffer the most from the absence of standards. Students in poverty-stricken schools often receive good grades despite poor skills and little understanding of basic facts. A 1994 U.S. Department of Education study concluded that students in poverty-stricken schools who receive mostly A's in English read only as well as "C" and "D" students in affluent schools. Similarly, students receiving mostly A's in mathematics in poverty-stricken schools perform in math about the same as "D" students in affluent schools.

Without standards, there is no benchmark against which student performance is measured, allowing students and teachers in one classroom to settle for performance that would not be acceptable in another school or classroom.

Grade inflation in poverty-stricken schools not only hurts students, but it incurs real economic costs. For instance, in recent years one result has been an increase in the percentage of students who qualify for college but who require remediation once enrolled. In Maryland, an estimated $17 million was spent last year in public colleges and universities to help students learn the information and skills that they should have learned in high school. This money would be better spent helping all students to meet higher standards before they graduated from high school. Students would not only be prepared for postsecondary education, but for the responsibilities of a career and civic life. Moreover, employers, college-admission officers, the public, and students would understand and appreciate the value of a high-school diploma.

Academic standards also will lead to other necessary educational reforms that, taken together, will significantly raise student achievement. Highly qualified teachers must be recruited, educated in the subjects they teach, and trained to know the most effective instructional strategies. Teachers need to be evaluated, and those who are unqualified must be let go. Resources must be reallocated to focus on classroom instruction and student learning. Tests must be created to assess student learning, and strategies must be developed for students who fail to meet the academic goals. Finally, schools and district must engage parents and community members to ensure support for reforms and public responsibility for the education of all students. In order for these reforms to be effective, they must be centered on a common set of goals and coordinated to work in unison. By defining what we expect of students, standards serve as a roadmap to guide these reforms.

But who should develop the standards and how should they be chosen? Stakeholders include business leaders, educators, parents, citizens, and students themselves -- all have a strong interest in determining what students should know and be able to do. And meaningful, effective standards must represent a consensus of all these groups. Government, as the manifestation of our democratic process, can lead in convening these stakeholders to begin this process. State government, in particular, is uniquely situated to bridge local and national interests in the development of meaningful standards. School districts can and do use the state standards as a starting point for their own more localized, more rigorous, requirements. That's what happened in Chicago three years ago: Educators and community representatives defined standards that exceeded the Illinois state goals.

State governments also have a great deal of legal authority to ensure educational quality. The Constitution grants the states the authority to provide free education to all children. The Supreme Court has upheld this authority, acknowledging states' fundamental interests in ensuring that children are educated to be productive individuals and responsible citizens.

The Court has asserted that "education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments [as] it is the very foundation of good citizenship" (Brown v Board of Education). In other decisions, the Court has held that "providing public schools ranks at the very apex of the function of a State" (Wisconsin v Yoder), and that one objective of education is "the inculcation of fundamental values necessary to the maintenance of a democratic system" (Bethel School District No 403 v Fraser). The setting of academic standards, we have argued, helps states to meet their responsibility.

There is some early evidence to suggest that rigorous standards aligned with meaningful assessments can raise the quality of the education system. Cornell University Professor John Bishop examined states, nations, and provinces that required students to pass exams tied to their curriculum at the end of high school. He discovered that such systems had higher standards for beginning teachers, paid higher teacher salaries, targeted more resources on core instructional functions, had students who scored higher in mathematics and geography, and employed more teachers with a major in the subject that they teach.

Academic standards, however, are not the silver bullet for improving public education. The setting of academic standards does not mean that all or even most students are suddenly going to meet them. The adoption of air-quality standards did not suddenly improve the quality of air in Los Angeles. A great deal of work and new technologies went into reducing the pollutants that came from automobiles and factories. The work and technologies, however, were guided and coordinated by the air-quality standards. Similarly, content standards are a necessary starting point toward meaningful education reform and increased student achievement.

Teaching With Standards in the Classroom, by Jill Barnes

This article appeared in the November 1997 issue of Basic Education

Council For Basic Education,
http://www.c-b-e.org/articles/barnes.htm

Standards. The word brings to mind visions of spinster schoolmarms brandishing unjustly sharp pointers intoning, "Write one hundred times..."

Those standards have been supplanted by a type of standard with an infinitely brighter future: our new national student learning standards. Many teachers cringe when hearing the term standards, but most already teach the content in these standards. In a middle-school English classroom, it's hard to teach something that is not covered by one or more standard. I have not considered my classroom standards-based, however, because there was no conscious effort on my part to align standards with learning.

To begin moving my classroom toward being consciously standards-based, I decided to create a unit designed to specifically address one standard. I chose to work with our district's language arts standard number 26 which states, "Gather, evaluate, and integrate information from multiple sources, such as firsthand experiences, computers, and library/multimedia centers, to prepare reports and presentations." At the time, my students were reading Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George. It is a gripping survival novel about a thirteen-year- old Inuit girl who is lost on the Alaskan tundra and befriends a pack of wolves. It is a well-crafted story, but one which my students have a difficult time relating to, as they cannot identify with Julie's situation.

I teach seventh-grade English in the Los Angeles Unified School District. My school has a diverse student population, many of whom have learned English as their second language. My classes average a fourth-grade reading level. Most of my students have never seen snow, so it is difficult for them to conceptualize the character's cold world-a world without roads, trees, or convenience stores. In order to increase my students' empathy with the character of Julie and to facilitate understanding of her surroundings, the students need to research the unfamiliar story elements of the weather, wolves, and the different lifestyles lived by those in Alaska.

The other reason I chose to create my standards-based unit on research was to challenge myself. I had found it difficult in past years to get students enthused about research, particularly within the context of a literature-based curriculum. I found a successful formula when I created the newspaper project, which combines newspaper-style writing with the background information needed for students to get the most out of Julie of the Wolves.

The unit uses student research to create a newspaper for a fictional Alaskan town. Each student designs his own masthead and name for the paper, and each newspaper is required to contain three factual news items, which students rewrite from articles found in a local paper. The newspaper must have two photos or pictures with captions, an article on wolves, an article of Alaskan historical interest, a human interest story based on events in Julie of the Wolves, a weather report for the state of Alaska, and an original cartoon with an Alaskan theme. Each newspaper also includes a how-to article or a recipe using Alaskan ingredients.

I designed this unit so that students would be required to use several different types of references-it wouldn't be a typical report, with information paraphrased (at best) from an encyclopedia. Instead, students would need to use newspapers, cookbooks, CD-Roms, and the Internet, as well as the trusty encyclopedia.

We began with the newspaper layout. The format was a four-page newspaper, with news items and the article taken from Julie of the Wolves on the front page, along with at least one picture. The interior and back pages were up to the students to arrange, as long as all the rest of the required items were included. I displayed several sample layouts as examples.

Each student was also required to bring in one newspaper to use as a guide. I realized how little experience my students had with newspapers, and this year, I will arrange to spend more classroom time with newspapers before the start of the project. Students loved working with real blank newsprint, each paper requiring only one large sheet when folded in half.

Students' pride in their work was augmented by the clear expectations of the task. Guidelines were set, with deadlines for each part of the project calendared well in advance. What helped the students most was the rubric that I created to grade their projects. I have used a rubric for years to grade student writing, but writing such a task-specific rubric and sharing it with students ahead of time (they each had their own copy) was new to me. I had to break myself of the thought that this was somehow cheating, to provide them with my expectations ahead of time. In creating our rubrics at the district level, we were told to use a four-point rubric, so that what we created would be in line with national standards.

I developed a rubric with a grading scale from 1 to 4, with a score of 4 containing all elements of the assignment and a score of 1 containing only a few of the required elements. In addition, a 4 newspaper demonstrated thorough research using various sources, and an appropriate newspaper format written in his/her own words. A 4 newspaper needed to be imaginatively and appealingly presented and to employ all the conventions of standard written English. Newspapers receiving scores of 1 to 3 had problems in each of these areas.

When grading the newspapers using the rubric, I found I needed to shift my thinking once again. Some newspapers were visually stunning, but a close reading revealed much copied information. Other students had very good information buried in a cramped or disorganized paper. Most students copied at some point in their paper, and this kept a fair number of papers from scoring in the upper half of the rubric.

The problem of students copying directly from the source can be alleviated by introducing shorter research tasks earlier in the semester. This will also help to reduce the student anxiety that comes from working with reference materials. If research is introduced well ahead of the unit, then the teacher will not need to teach many new skills during the course of the newspaper project. In this way, the scope of the newspaper project may be grander than that which we usually attempt in class, but the skills within that project are familiar.

This research project was a success for me, as the student work was produced individually, and the final product was written. Student understanding of concepts presented in the novel was greatly enhanced. For the first time, students understood how barren the North Slope of Alaska is, and how desperate was the predicament of the young girl in the story. By changing the specific tasks required in this project, this unit is easily adapted to other novels featuring exotic or unfamiliar settings and lifestyles.

I have regrouped much of my classroom teaching to fit better with the district, state, and national standards, and have found that in most cases standards-based teaching is easy to implement. The new standards can help organize a classroom and provide an instructional framework for new teachers. Soon teachers will reach for the standards as easily as they reach for the chalk.

NCTE/IRA English Language Arts Standards, Chapter 3 Excerpt

http://www.ncte.org/standards/chap3.shtml

     The standards presented in this chapter define what we believe students should know and be able to do in the English language arts. As the preceding chapters have made clear, we believe that these standards should articulate a consensus growing out of actual classroom practices, and not be a prescriptive framework. If the standards work, then teachers will recognize their students, themselves, their goals, and their daily endeavors in this document; so, too, will they be inspired, motivated, and provoked to reevaluate some of what they do in class. By engaging with these standards, teachers will, we hope, also think and talk energetically about the assumptions that underlie their own classroom practices and those of their colleagues.

     The standards reflect some of the best ideas already at work in English language arts education around the country. Because language and the language arts continue to evolve and grow, our standards must remain provisional enough to leave room for future developments in the field. And it is important to reemphasize that these standards are meant to be suggestive, not exhaustive. Ideally, teachers, parents, administrators, and students will use them as starting points for an ongoing discussion about classroom activities and curricula.

     The primary focus of the standards is on the content of English language arts learning. As we noted in the preceding chapter, content cannot be separated from the purpose, development, and context of language learning. As educators translate these standards into practice, they must consider the unique range of purposes, developmental processes, and contexts that exists in their communities.

     The twelve content standards for the English language arts follow. Let us reflect briefly on the group as a whole before moving into more specific elaborations of each in turn.

     The act of setting out a list like this one implies that knowledge and understanding can be sliced into tidy and distinct categories, but obviously literacy learning (like any other area of human learning) is far more complicated than that. We acknowledge the complex relationships that exist among the standards. Further, we do not mean to imply that the standards can or should be translated into isolated components of instruction. On the contrary: virtually any instructional activity is likely to address multiple standards simultaneously. Nor is the order of arrangement and numbering of the standards meant to suggest any progression or hierarchy. Numbering them simply makes it easer to refer to them concisely in discussion.

     Readers will recognize that these standards can be grouped into clusters. Standards 1 and 2, for example, discuss the range of materials that students should read and their purposes for reading; the former emphasizes breadth and diversity of texts, while the latter concentrates on literary works. Like Standards 1 and 2, Standard 3 also concerns reading, but it addresses reading strategies or processes rather than texts. this third standard also relates to Standard 4; both emphasize the importance of students' knowledge of language use, variation, and conventions.

     Standards 5 and 6 work together to move from reading and comprehending to creating texts. Both discuss the types of knowledge that students need in order to use language effectively as writers, speakers, or visual representers. Both of these standards also emphasize the connections between reading and writing and the importance of gaining a working knowledge of language structure and conventions. The next pair of standards, 7 and 8, concern research and inquiry. Standard 7 stresses student approaches to inquiry, while Standard 8 concentrates on the use of research materials, with particular attention to new, technologically driven modes of research and data synthesis.

     The evolving needs of America's students--whose growing ethnic and linguistic diversity is changing the social makeup of contemporary classrooms--are taken up in Standards 9 and 10. Taken together, these standards suggest that a multicultural language arts curriculum is both useful and necessary today, offering students the language resources they will need to participate in the nation and world of tomorrow.

     The last two standards build on the vital recognition that literacy has both social and personal significance for language users. Standard 11 stresses the use of collaborative learning as a way for students to use the language arts to find and develop a sense of community. In Standard 12, students, motivated by their own goals, learn that the language arts can help them discover a sense of their individuality as well.

     Readers will find other ways of linking these standards: the issue of new technology, for example, addressed explicitly in Standard 8, on research materials, is also a central theme in the discussion of literacy communities in number 11. Student-directed learning, a theme throughout many of the standards, explicitly links numbers 7, 10, and 11. The structures and conventions of language, a central topic in all of the language arts, form a key focus in Standards 3, 4, 6, and 9.

     We encourage readers to reflect upon other ways in which these standards are connected, and to think through the elaborations of the individual standards using the lens provided by the graphic discussed in Chapter 2. That perspective may be used to explore the interplay of content, purpose, development, and context within each of the standards, and it serves to remind us of the central importance of the individual learner in all of them. Much as the dimension of context encircles our language leaning model, so we hope teachers and other readers of these standards will draw on their own knowledge and experience, and the salient needs in their own educational communities, to enrich and expand the brief elaborations offered [here].

Language Arts: Standards in Concept and Detail

Education World: National Standards, Language Arts

http://www.education-world.com/standards/national/lang_arts/english/k_12.shtml

Reading For Perspective, 12.1:  Students read a wide range of print and nonprint texts to build an understanding of texts, of themselves, and of the cultures of the United States and the world; to acquire new information; to respond to the needs and demands of society and the workplace; and for personal fulfillment. Among these texts are fiction and nonfiction, classic and contemporary works.

Understanding the Human Experience, 12.2: Students read a wide range of literature from many periods in many genres to build an understanding of the many dimensions (e.g., philosophical, ethical, aesthetic) of human experience.

Evaluation Strategies, 12.3: Students apply a wide range of strategies to comprehend, interpret, evaluate, and appreciate texts. They draw on their prior experience, their interactions with other readers and writers, their knowledge of word meaning and of other texts, their word identification strategies, and their understanding of textual features (e.g., sound-letter correspondence, sentence structure, context, graphics).

Communication Skills, 12.4: Students adjust their use of spoken, written, and visual language (e.g., conventions, style, vocabulary) to communicate effectively with a variety of audiences and for different purposes.

Communication Strategies, 12.5: Students employ a wide range of strategies as they write and use different writing process elements appropriately to communicate with different audiences for a variety of purposes.

Applying Knowledge, 12.6:  Students apply knowledge of language structure, language conventions (e.g., spelling and punctuation), media techniques, figurative language, and genre to create, critique, and discuss print and nonprint texts.

Evaluating Data, 12.7:  Students conduct research on issues and interests by generating ideas and questions, and by posing problems. They gather, evaluate, and synthesize data from a variety of sources (e.g., print and nonprint texts, artifacts, people) to communicate their discoveries in ways that suit their purpose and audience.

Developing Research Skills, 12.8:  Students use a variety of technological and information resources (e.g., libraries, databases, computer networks, video) to gather and synthesize information and to create and communicate knowledge.

Multicultural Understanding, 12.9:  Students develop an understanding of and respect for diversity in language use, patterns, and dialects across cultures, ethnic groups, geographic regions, and social roles.

Applying Non-English Perspectives, 12.10:  Students whose first language is not English make use of their first language to develop competency in the English language arts and to develop understanding of content across the curriculum.

Participating in Society, 12.11:  Students participate as knowledgeable, reflective, creative, and critical members of a variety of literacy communities.

Applying Language Skills, 12.12:  Students use spoken, written, and visual language to accomplish their own purposes (e.g., for learning, enjoyment, persuasion, and the exchange of information).

Reality Check:
The Status of Standards Reform.
Public Agenda's second annual Reality Check opinion survey found that the perception gap between those inside and outside the public school system is wide - and getting wider

Public Agenda Online
http://7-12educators.about.com/education/.htm

Reality Check is a multi-year Public Agenda project in association with Education Week and funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts and the GE Fund. The series of public opinion surveys are designed to find out what impact the drive to improve education standards is having on the people most directly affected: the teachers, parents and students living under new standards, and the employers and college professors who should see the results.

So far, the people directly involved with the public schools rate student skills more highly than the employers and college professors who deal with the students after graduation. For example, firm majorities of teachers and parents give their schools good ratings, but employers are even more skeptical than in last year's survey, saying students are losing ground on "soft skills" such as motivation and working well with others.

Yet Reality Check suggests that employers may be overlooking one of their most effective tools for change. Students overwhelmingly say having to show their high school transcript to get a job would motivate them to work harder. But most employers say they don't have much faith in school grades, and only 16 percent ask applicants for a transcript.

Teachers indicate that progress is being made in their schools, with more teachers using state standards for guidance. But teachers also are skeptical of many of the accountability proposals endorsed by other groups, often finding them inaccurate and unfair.

Major findings of Reality Check '99 include:

Perception Gap:
There is a wide and growing gap between the way employers and college professors rate the skills of public school graduates and the views of parents, teachers and students. On some measures, the views of employers are even more skeptical than last year.

High Ratings, Little Info:
Parents give high ratings to schools on communication and emphasizing academics, but they admit having little knowledge about how their kids and schools are doing. Compared to teachers, parents underestimate the degree of social promotion that takes place.

Standards Set:
As in last year's survey, majorities of all groups say standards have been set in their local schools, at least in concept. More teachers are using state standards for guidance, but many say social promotion continues and only half say standards have raised their expectations for students.

Holding Back:
Teachers are highly resistant to many measures to increase accountability supported by parents, professors and employers. Teachers reject measures like eliminating tenure for principals and tying financial incentives to performance; most stay ratings tend to be inaccurate and unfair. Teachers say they are rarely evaluated on the basis of student performance.

Carrots and Sticks:
Students are clear about what makes them put in more effort: fear of failure, exit exams, knowing employers look at transcripts, and the desire to get into a good college. But schools, parents and employers may not be pushing the right buttons. For example, few employers review high school transcripts, and most doubt grades accurately reflect student abilities.

Additional information about education policy and public opinion is available on our Public Agenda Online service. We analyze public opinion data drawn from a wide range of polling organizations, as well as provide background statistics, a news digest and a comprehensive list of organizations involved in the debate. Public Agenda Online offers similar analysis of 18 public policy issues. Visit Learning Curve, our reporter's guide to Education.