What It Is
Standards are accepted or required bodies of knowledge that students must know and be able to do in every subject, at every grade. Testing or assessment often -- though not always -- measures how those standards are met. The education world is awash in standards and testing talk. It’s critical to understand.
Contrary to what some believe, holding students to high standards doesn't equate to lower graduation rates or student achievement. A Friendship Public Charter School in Washington D.C., for instance, has the highest graduation rate of ANY high school in the nation's capital at 88.5 percent. Over in the City of Brotherly Love, the college enrollment rate for the inaugural class at Boys' Latin surpasses Philadelphia district averages. These schools and others are shattering the notion that raising the bar will actually lower statistics.Latest Updates
The two generations of reform efforts fueled by A Nation at Risk, while commendable and necessary, have only begun to scratch the surface when one considers the enormous achievement problems we still have today.
Where do we stand thirty years after this seminal education reform report warned us of the deteriorating state of American education?
American Enterprise Institute (AEI) hosts an event on Common Core and the education reform movement. CER President Jeanne Allen discusses charter schools and social studies standards.
It is just weeks away from the 30th anniversary of A Nation At Risk, and we are STILL struggling with what to do with kids who can’t read. Really? Read more in the Washington Post article “States draw a hard line on third-graders, holding some back over reading”.
Successful school leader and one-time CER awardee Deborah Kenny of Village Academies makes the case for good teaching as the key to triumphant kids, not standards alone. Read her Op-Ed about how the Common Core is affecting how schools handle young children here.
Nation’s Report Card study reveals mega-states lagging national average despite modest gains.
What We Believe
High standards are essential in ensuring that every student is prepared for and able to move on to each grade, and that tests, developed at the state level and correlated directly to the standards, are critical to gauge progress. We believe that every parent in America and every teacher to whom parents entrust their children deserve to have high, measurable standards against which to gauge the progress of the enterprise for which they share responsibility. We believe in accountability as a consequence of performance measured against stated measures of proficiency. Any school that consistently fails its students, no matter where those schools are or the demographics of its children, should be closed.