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[What Is Meant By "High Standards"]
It's no secret: Many children in this country can learn more than they currently do.
Helping children learn more begins with higher expectations. But is it realistic to expect all students to reach high standards?
Sharon LeBlond, a Chapter 1 teacher in rural Norway, Maine, tells about low-performing students who achieved dramatic gains on state assessments. It happened after she began using the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics standards to guide improvements in instruction. (Satellite Town Meeting, U.S. Department of Education, September 1993) Eileen Barton of Chicago's Sullivan High School says that "By requiring that all our students demonstrate the competencies we had earlier demanded from only a few, we found they not only could meet our expectations but were willing to work harder than ever before to do so." (Horace, Coalition of Essential Schools, Jan 93)
It's not just currently low-performing students. Many students who now earn decent grades must be challenged to stretch for the higher levels of learning that they are capable of reaching. Consider: Only 7 percent of our students take the Advanced Placement in biology, while more than four times that percentage of students in other countries take comparably challenging biology tests -- 31 percent in England and Wales, 43 percent in France, 37 percent in Germany, and more than 40 percent in Japan. How many students pass these exams? Between 25 percent and 36 percent in the other countries. In the U.S., just 4 percent pass the AP in biology. (American Federation of Teachers' "Making Standards Count: The Case for Student Incentives," May 1994)
Many teachers agree: All students can learn at much higher levels, and we must expect them to. But our higher expectations must not stop with students. We must also expect more of ourselves -- more of teachers, more of parents and families, more of employers, policymakers and citizens.
GOALS 2000 "is the most significant piece of education legislation we've ever had," writes Albert Shanker, President of the American Federation of Teachers. While "in and of itself, [GOALS 2000] won't solve the problems of our education system...it provides a structure without which we can't begin to solve them...."[The New York Times, April 24, 1994]
GOALS 2000 makes it clear that everyone has a role to play: all of us must do our part. Many seem ready to do so. GOALS 2000 is supported by every major education, parent, and business group in the U.S. These are just a few of the many groups that support GOALS 2000:
Teachers must take on a number of leadership roles, and not just in "implementing plans," though that's important. GOALS 2000 says that each planning panel at every level -- state, district, and school -- must include classroom teachers. This means teachers are to be involved in the creation of plans. It means your ideas are needed and are important to developing plans that will work.
The schools we need require different habits of work and habits of mind on the part of teachers -- a kind of professionalism within the classroom few teachers were expected to exhibit before. In addition, to get from where we are now to where we need to be will require teachers to play a substantially different role within their schools as well as in public discourse. Teachers need to relearn what it means to be good in- school practitioners, while also becoming more articulate and self-confident spokespeople for the difficult and often anxiety- producing changes schools are expected to undertake. If teachers are not able to join in leading such changes, the changes will not take place."Deborah Meier,
Teachers College Record,
Summer 1992
There are other challenges where teacher leadership is important. Maybe the need to strengthen family involvement or students' writing is pressing in your school. Or maybe there is a difficult-to-teach concept or skill for which you've developed an unusually effective approach. Such needs in your school and breakthroughs in your classroom point to prime opportunities for you to step forward.
But regardless of those circumstances, there is probably one challenge where leadership from you -- and from teachers everywhere in the U.S. -- is urgent. It is a challenge that no state, community, or school can take on effectively unless teachers help lead the way. So important -- and so central to teachers' involvement in GOALS 2000 -- is this challenge that the remainder of this booklet is organized around it.
This challenge orbits around two questions:
"How do you determine, in an age of information overload, what teachers will teach?" asks Gloria Sesso, a U.S. history teacher in Dix Hills, New York. "What do you include and what do you not include?" Standards offer criteria for making that decision, says Sesso.
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