Standards and Assessments: Focusing for Essential Knowledge and Skills

The time has come for the nation to adopt more academically rigorous common standards defining what mathematics and science education ought to look like for all Americans. The Commission believes that math and science standards should be fewer, clearer, and higher and that they should articulate our best understanding of what all students need to know and be able to do in order to succeed in college, thrive in the workforce, and participate in civic life. We endorse the proposition, advanced by David Coleman and Jason Zimba in a 2007 memorandum to the Commission, that “standards must be made significantly fewer in number, significantly clearer in their meaning and relevance for college and work, and significantly higher in terms of the expectations for mastery of what is covered³⁵.” In testimony to the House of Representatives in April 2009, Commission member James Hunt, former governor of North Carolina, argued that new, common standards “must be based on evidence of what’s necessary and sufficient for students to succeed in college and in work.… It should be a tight common core that teachers can teach and students can understand and master³⁶.”

Further, we believe that, if common standards are to serve their intended purpose—to guide stronger math and science instruction for all American students and improve the performance of teachers, schools, and classrooms—they must be linked closely with new, high-quality assessments and more effective systems of accountability. The Commission also urges the adoption of guidelines for the periodic review and revision of standards and assessments to reflect new evidence about how students learn and what they need to know.

Common standards would be a strong platform upon which to build a more effective instructional infrastructure for American math and science education: educators, along with the schools, districts, and states in which they work, would be able to concentrate on how math and science are taught and on how much students are learning rather than on what to teach. Common standards would provide the framework for a widespread, national conversation about how educators can best help students in all groups—from struggling to advanced—to master academically rigorous content and acquire essential skills. They would provide a similar framework for the preparation of future teachers.

Developed collaboratively by states for the nation but not federally promulgated or required, common standards would be national in scope and would provide a common frame of reference as states and school systems upgrade math and science education, rethink curriculum and course sequences, demand better textbooks and curriculum materials from vendors, and build math and science into students’ learning across the curriculum. They would provide needed focus to teacher preparation and ongoing professional learning. For states that choose to adopt them, common standards would make tangible a set of thoughtfully considered, research-validated objectives for students, educators, and schools—objectives that could be refined over time as we learn from ongoing research on their implementation in different states.

High-quality common assessments, based on the proposed common standards and supporting their implementation, would encourage and reward effective instruction. Meaningful assessments that reward good teaching and learning would enable states and school systems to establish priorities, design instructional programs and approaches linked to the standards, and set long-range and interim targets for student and school performance. Assessments linked with common standards could be used in many states, thus opening the possibility of reducing costs and achieving more efficient processes for analyzing and improving the quality of the instruments. Common assessments would also enable states to assess the pace at which their schools are improving more effectively and to measure performance against international benchmarks.

Objectives

• Establish common mathematics and science standards that are fewer, clearer, and higher and that stimulate and guide instructional improvement in math and science and lead the way toward preparing all American students for a global economy

• Develop sophisticated assessments and accountability mechanisms that, along with common standards, stimulate and guide instructional improvement and innovation in mathematics and science