Standards.

They've become a mantra for politicians in nearly every jurisdiction in the United States. With polls indicating that education is front and center among voters' premier concerns, politicians in nearly every state have been eager to pick up the banner of school reform.

Armed with a booming economy and the seeming absence of an international threat, state governors have turned their attention to fixing whatever needs to be fixed in the nation's public school system, employing standards-based reforms to resuscitate education.

The concept is simple. Standards-based reform holds the schools and their workforce accountable for student learning. It is a logical, politically and economically appealing policy that sets forward what students should know by the time they complete each grade level, with tests used to assess whether or not students have achieved the goals, or standards, lawmakers have set. These goals vary from state to state.

The new policy doesn't come without its critics, however. Conservatives wedded to local control take issue with the centralization of education policy under statewide standards. Then, too, some teachers fear that their entire curriculum will be dictated by test content. Moreover, opponents to high-stakes testing, which judges students' futures on a single score, have argued against the wholesale, top-down approach to reform.

Nevertheless, proponents of standards are counting on the system to yield results. A crisis in confidence in public education spurred reform. Politicians searching for an expedient way to fix the situation decided to set goals or standards and test students to ensure the goals were being met. Now that the standards are in place in 49 states, proponents and opponents alike await results.

About 15 years ago, a sobering series of reports, including A Nation At Risk (1983) and Time For Results (1986), lamented the state of public education, and warned that U.S. students' failure to live up to their potential could lead to an economic crisis and could even become a national security issue.

In 1989, in response to the studies, President George Bush summoned the nation's governors, including Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas, to the first-ever "education summit" in Charlottesville, Virginia. The intent was to find a way to raise academic achievement so U.S. students would be able to compete in the global economy. The result was Goals 2000, a commitment by the participating governors to improve U.S. education through a series of education goals to be reached by the year 2000.

In 1994, President Clinton shepherded through the U.S. Congress the Goals 2000: Educate America Act. The legislation gave states federal (U.S. Government) aid to help them devise their own academic standards and create assessments to measure progress toward those goals. Standards language also made its way into reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act passed by Congress that same year.

It was at this point that some states began setting academic standards, clearly defining what they wanted students to learn at each grade level. But progress was slow. By the time governors and business leaders met for their second summit in 1996, only 14 states had adopted standards. The nation's students continued to score low on international tests. Business executives were consumed with concern over the growing need for highly skilled workers, and university professors complained that high school graduates were woefully underprepared. Parents, too, were not blind to the quality issue within public school education, and were demanding to know how their tax dollars were being spent. Politicians were put on notice. Confronted with the issue at the education summits, they pledged systemic reforms, agreeing to write standards into statewide policy and to commission the preparation of tests that would measure whether the standards had been met. Rewards and sanctions were to be put in place to hold schools and students responsible for meeting the state's goals.

Since the 1996 summit, every state but one has adopted the concept of standards. More than 40 have created tests to measure whether students are reaching the new goals that have been set for them. Only Iowa, deferring to local control, has failed to pass state standards legislation.

Generally, the process of establishing standards has been a democratic one. Legislators appointed special commissions comprised of teachers, university professors, community leaders, business leaders and politicians to establish statewide standards for English, mathematics, science and history. In Delaware, for example, a team set academic standards and produced a test to measure how students are learning and performing at the benchmark school grades of 3, 5, 8 and 10. During its most recent legislative season, Delaware lawmakers passed a package of accountability laws to back up the standards they put in place in 1995. The tests will allow educators to compare student performance at the school, state and national level.

"To succeed in an increasingly competitive world in the 21st century," the legislation states, in language resembling that of other jurisdictions, "Delaware's children must meet high standards. Establishing rigorous standards in core academic subjects -- and attaching consequences for failing to meet them -- creates powerful incentives for schools, students, teachers, administrators and parents to strive for academic excellence."

For those students who fail the test, most states have adopted repercussions -- both for students and for schools. These accountability measures include: ending social promotion (the practice of sending a child on to the next grade even though he or she has not mastered the standards for the present one); prohibiting graduation for secondary school students unless they pass the state exit exam; ranking the schools (sometimes with letter grades) based on student performance on the test. Some states are also tying teachers' evaluations to student improvement. In fact, nearly 40 states issue "report cards" on the schools -- evaluations by the state educational departments -- measuring whether the institutions are meeting state academic standards. Naturally, because of the keen interest in educational progress everywhere, these report cards receive wide media attention.

Grading the schools has not been without controversy. Invariably, schools that regularly receive failing grades are in lower-income sectors of the state which often do not inherently enjoy the resources or social climate necessary to help them turn around. What's more, the allocation of resources often depends upon the school's ranking. Over the last decade, 23 states passed laws giving them the power to take over failing schools. Eleven have done just that. A few districts in large urban areas, such as Chicago, have followed suit. The Chicago mayor even has the authority to shut down failing schools.

In 1999, Governor Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania championed through the state legislature the Academic Recovery Act, which frees the state's eight worst performing schools from state mandates on hiring and contracting. If the schools continue to fail under the relaxed mandates, they will be placed under the direction of a state-appointed control board.

When a school is taken over, or reconstituted, a team of experts goes into the school and does whatever it takes to turn it around. Once standards are set and it is clear what students should know, testing and accountability come into play. This is the real challenge for many lawmakers. They find it difficult, frequently, to maintain the policies they set in motion, because prohibiting social promotion or denying seniors their graduation day can plant the seeds of public outrage.

In Virginia, for instance, where the new Standards of Learning (SOL) statewide test has seen very low passing rates its first two years, lawmakers were urged by test opponents to consider six pieces of legislation that would have diluted the standards set. None passed. And in Wisconsin, lawmakers were forced to repeal the graduation examination that had been put in place.

The debate over assessment strikes at the cornerstone of the standards reform movement. For politicians, tests are an attractive tool because they are relatively inexpensive, can be swiftly put in place, show quick results for better or worse, and allow immediate action. And they can be applied without meddling in classroom instruction -- which normally comes under local control. Yet at the third education summit, held in 1999, a number of governors, educators and officials expressed concern about staying the course on reform because of the growing backlash. Some parents, students and teachers oppose standards from the outset, seeing them as too rigorous and routine. Other opponents have no problem with the standards -- but rather with the high-stakes testing. As more states link school and teacher performance to students' test scores -- and offer rewards or sanctions accordingly -- many parents and educators fear that classroom education will consist of rote learning. Among the targets of their concern: the exit exams in two dozen states that students must pass before they are allowed to graduate. In Massachusetts this past spring, students delivered petitions with 7,000 signatures demanding that the state repeal the law that ties their high school diploma to passing the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment Exam. In all, grassroots parent groups opposed to high-stakes tests have sprung up in at least a dozen states.

In some cases the rush toward accountability has outpaced the ability of politicians and educators to provide schools and teachers with the tools they need to help students meet the standards. In states where education reforms and graduation tests were phased in slowly -- Texas, Kentucky and Maryland -- resistance from parents, students and teachers has been minimal. Both Texas and North Carolina have been lauded by policy experts for their standards and assessments, which have been more comprehensive and have been in place longer than in other states. They rank schools, issue school-wide report cards, require graduation exams, and provide assistance to struggling schools and reward those that do well.

According to David Grissmer, a researcher at The Rand Corporation who has analyzed the two states' reforms, the centerpiece of the two models is very similar. Both states have aligned standards to the textbooks and the curriculum that are used in the schools; the tests are closely linked with the standards material; local school districts have received policy-making and funding flexibility, and both states keep track of test score data in order to continually improve reform policies. As a result, Texas and North Carolina have made significant statistical advancement in student performance on state tests as well as on the National Assessment of Education Progress, a voluntary national test. In Texas, even minority students (for whom the challenge of a rigorous state test may be greater) have pulled up their scores.

Still, the standards-based approach represents a shift from the traditional commitment in the United States to local control of public education. For more than a century, the nation's youth -- and their families -- have enjoyed the benefit of free schooling, under the aegis of local governments. The shift in responsibility from local school districts and elected school boards to state legislatures and executives is a sea change in U.S. education. To be sure, local school boards and district school chiefs still may set policy. But the emphasis on results has spurred state officials to act.

One question that arises is whether public education reform is hampered by the political process -- the frequent turnover in control of executive and legislative branches of states following elections. However, in addition to designating state education administrators, many governors also appoint school board members, to rolling terms. This means that even when a governor's administration ends, the people he has named to school boards remain in place to help carry out his or her reforms.

The power shift in governance over the schools has taken place over the past decade or two, fueled by such chief executives as Lamar Alexander in Tennessee, Richard Riley (now U.S. Secretary of Education) in South Carolina, Colorado's Roy Romer, Thomas H. Kean in New Jersey and Bill Clinton in Arkansas, who drove standards-based reform forward. James Hunt of North Carolina is the last of this breed, and he is leaving office when his term ends at the end of this year.

Will there be a new generation of leaders to propel Goals 2000 forward? If it does emerge, most likely the next wave of standards-based reforms will deal directly with the classroom. The 1999 education summit concentrated on quality teaching, at a time of an approaching teacher shortage. Political and business leaders and education officials are now looking for ways to improve teacher preparation, and to align training and professional development with state standards. They are working with graduate schools of education to develop courses that will enable future teachers to have the resources to meet standards.

As the teacher shortage looms, as the student population expands, states are competing to hire the best and brightest, especially in math, science and computer science. Urban and rural schools especially are feeling the pinch. State legislators are engaged in a competition -- tempting candidates with scholarships, loan forgiveness, housing and signing bonuses. Recently, Governor Gray Davis of California proposed that new teachers be excused from paying state income taxes -- a revolutionary stance. Still, even as they try to recruit new teachers, state officials seek to raise the quality of teaching by presenting challenging qualifying tests to teaching candidates and mandating the continuing professional development of veteran teachers.

Ultimately, quality teaching is vital to the success of standards-based reform. The hope of politicians on state and local levels -- as well as in Washington -- plus the business community and the public at large is that standards-based reforms will create a skilled, educated work force, a new American pioneer, able to embrace with vigor the challenges of this new century.

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Tiffany Danitz monitors education as a staff writer for stateline.org, an online news service that covers politics and issues in the 50 U.S. states. The site is funded with a grant from the Pew Charitable Trust and is offered free to the public.

The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Government.