![[Table of Contents]](/icons/up.gif){kind=icon}
As a result of the continued support of Goals 2000 and the ongoing effort to reform education, schools and student performance are improving. All 50 States and the outlying areas are currently benefitting from Goals 2000 support and direction. State-by-State, at varying rates of progress, student achievement is increasing, and State and local education leaders agree that Goals 2000 has played a significant role in the process. The program clearly represents an important investment in helping all children achieve to high standard.
However, much more needs to be accomplished. As Richard Elmore has written, "There is a curious pattern associated with innovation and reform in American education. Good ideas about teaching practice and school organization routinely take root in a few settings and often flourish there, but seldom 'go to scale.'" (Elmore, "Incentives for Going to Scale with Effective Practices," p. 1.) The continuing and ultimate challenges lie in bringing the kinds of changes outlined in Goals 2000 and standards-based reform to the classroom level--in all classrooms across the country. To what extent are all teachers and schools familiar with the standards, to what extent are they driven by them, and do they believe and behave as though all children can reach them? Is student performance improving universally and for all children? Implementation of significant changes--particularly across formerly fragmented systems--aligned to high standards and improved performance necessitates a sustained commitment to education reform.
To truly pursue the mission of both Goals 2000 and the collective American will, education reform cannot be limited to select districts, schools, or children; it must effectively reach everyone. As States and localities continue to recognize that imperative, they will struggle with the difficulty of negotiating individual learning styles with common standards for all. Considerable attention will need to be applied to the way in which we think about education, students, and the supports provided to ensure achievement for all populations of students.
While a few States and districts are making significant progress in closing achievement gaps between student groups, the effort to fulfill the promise of high standards for all children presents a monumental task, which educators and policy-makers must be both ready and willing to undertake.
"Demanding more from our schools is not enough--the system itself [at local, district, and State levels] must be fundamentally changed." (Thompson, "Systemic Education Reform," 1994.) Establishing content and performance standards, though necessary, must be seen as a first step to achieving improved student performance. Standards must drive all elements in the education system, including student assessment; curriculum and instruction; the education that prepares teachers; the activities that involve parents; and the manner in which--as well as the scale against which--the education enterprise is supported and held accountable. When school improvement efforts fail to coordinate all of the elements of reform, they fail to effectively change the system and, in doing so, inevitably fail to respond to the needs of America's children.
Similarly, while successful reform requires coordination throughout systems, it also requires coordination of the resources and planning processes that support them. For the vision of both Goals 2000 and ESEA to be truly realized, communities must actively work to connect federal, state, and local resources around a shared vision for school improvement. Efforts to reform education cannot be program-centered but rather student-centered. Reform planning must begin with determining the needs of students and the community and then consider both the availability and utility of all resources to meet those needs.
While, through the support and encouragement of Goals 2000, many States and districts are increasingly focusing their resources and efforts on shared expectations for student achievement and school improvement, this focus must also be emphasized and brought to scale. Goals 2000 serves as a vehicle to assist States and districts to both intervene in failing schools and maintain healthy ones by providing a framework for coordinating education efforts around increased academic expectations and support for all children, but the implementation task is not an easy one.
As described by Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction Suellen Reed, "The challenge we have is to use the Goals 2000 framework and the limited resources it ... provide[s] ... in a way that makes sense and addresses ... state[s]' needs."
Goals 2000 plays a significant role in improving the continuous development of educators; however, the work is not complete. For the instructional system to truly support achievement to high expectations, both the preservice and the inservice education of teachers must be more job embedded, teacher and learner centered, and intensely focused on results.
The process of developing and implementing professional development activities that are ongoing and aligned to both teachers' daily work and higher standards requires a dramatic shift from traditional notions of outside, and often unrelated, course-taking and conference-going as professional growth efforts. To be effective, professional development efforts cannot be fragmented from a larger standards-driven plan for school change; they must continue to concentrate on implementation of standards and the curriculum rather than on single issues.
One of the greatest challenges to thinking strategically about professional development is the difficulty in finding adequate time and resources to support such systemic efforts. In most schools, where a teacher's schedule includes only one planning period a day, and where that time rarely coincides with that of colleagues teaching in the same field or grade level, common planning and coordinated regular professional development activities are often seen as nearly impossible to achieve.
Steven O. Laing, Associate Superintendent, Utah State Office of Education, affirms that "Goals 2000 is enabling our public schools to meet vital staff development needs," by supporting local level professional development planning and activities aligned to high expectations of student achievement. However, the effort requires considerably more attention.
Successfully monitoring and assessing progress in improving the academic achievement of all students is crucial. Measuring the performance of all students against standards is neither simple nor inexpensive. Tests and other assessment measures, like curriculum and instruction, are tools for teaching and learning that serve as gateways to academic achievement. While States are demonstrating marked success in developing standards for what every child should know and be able to do, accurately measuring performance aligned to those standards--particularly for all children--continues to be difficult. Despite traditional demands for single assessments that compare children to each other, the successful implementation of standards-based education reform requires ongoing assessment of performance that is tied to standards and yields outcome data that supports improved instruction.
States must continue to develop and refine standards of student performance, while undertaking the complicated process of selecting and developing, preparing for, and administering aligned, reliable, and inclusive assessments of that performance. States and districts are confronted by the continuing conflict within the education community about the very value and nature of particular assessments. For example, while most agree that performance-based assessments provide more accurate descriptions of student progress and are more helpful in informing classroom practice, their administration is expensive and time consuming. Likewise, such authentic assessments, by their very nature, are difficult to standardize across large numbers with much validity.
Similar assessment debates abound in regard to the impact of assessments. Should high stakes be attached to their results, and if so, for whom? Who should be held accountable for assessment outcomes--teachers, students, schools, or districts--and for what: overall scores, value added progress, other indicators of school level progress? What is the future impact of failing to promote children as a result of poor assessment outcomes? Will sanctions against poor performing schools limit their ability to improve?
In implementing high standards and assessments aligned to those standards, States and districts face the demands, not only of including, but also of effectively serving all children. The diverse needs of minority, economically disadvantaged, non-English speaking students, and students with disabilities must be heavily considered as an integral part of comprehensive planning, not as after-thoughts.
Substantial education reform is an iterative process that requires ongoing action, assessment, evaluation, and corrective action. As such, both data and research take on valuable roles in informing continuous improvements.
States and districts demonstrating the greatest success in education reform tend to be those that have developed systems for continually assessing where they are and where they are headed, and that measure their progress in getting there. Goals 2000 supports that process across States and districts. Forty-seven States--as well as the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the outlying areas--have Goals 2000-approved State-wide plans for school improvement that include goals and objectives against which they continue to measure their progress. Though difficult, almost all are developing aligned State-wide assessments and other mechanisms for measuring performance and collecting valid and reliable data, and they are pursuing better means of supporting local level improvements and accountability for change. However, a scarcity of valuable and reliable data at the federal level has often limited the ability to inform progress or change. For example, Congress only recently appropriated funds for national evaluation of Goals 2000, and very little attention has been given to the program in large scale studies.
Despite the challenges, States and districts must continue to seek out, interpret, and appropriately integrate valuable information into their planning and implementation processes. Communities need to undergo broad needs assessments to identify their greatest challenges and to target areas for focusing their efforts. These assessments should not, however, be limited to initial planning, but should be conducted regularly to describe progress in serving all children, across all grade levels, and in all disciplines. The resulting data should therefore be used to inform professional development planning, coordinate resources, build community support, and focus the entire school community on achieving measurable goals.
Similarly, school communities need to recognize that they are not alone in the challenge of school reform. Rather than "reinvent the wheel," communities need additional support and encouragement in using established research in education change, and being able to interpret it in ways that provide meaning and applicability across diverse schooling contexts. Again, this process of learning from and modeling what is already known is most effective only when schools and districts have been reflective about their own context and improvement needs.
Dr. Henry Marockie, West Virginia Superintendent of Schools, described in his recent U.S. Senate testimony that Goals 2000 provides the flexibility and incentives to develop coordinated strategic plans that prioritize needs, address local concerns, and align necessarily diverse efforts. "The seemingly impossible dream of top down, bottom up reform [is] becoming a reality. At last," Dr. Marockie reported, "the Feds finally got it right." (Elementary and Secondary Education Reform Actions by the States with Support Through Federal Programs, Testimony Before the Education Task Force Committee on the Budget, United States Senate, February 11, 1998.)
While the impact of Goals 2000 and standards-based reform is becoming increasingly more evident, the challenge now is to continue in that vein and sustain momentum for the difficult work ahead. Comprehensive reform does not happen quickly; it requires sustained commitment of time and resources, as well as patience and support for change.
If Elmore's "curious pattern" of limited change is to be broken, the promising practices identified in standards-based reform and supported by Goals 2000 must be encouraged to take root everywhere and "go to scale" across the Nation.
[Appendix A]