Standards and accountability
in education
Definition Systems designed objectively to
measurement success and failure in student
instruction and to hold teachers responsible for
their performance
The standards and accountability movement sought to im-
port management practices from the business world to im-
prove the nation’s schools. It began as a grassroots move-
ment early in the 1980’s in response to the disappointment
felt by many parents at their communities’ educational sys-
tems. By the end of the decade, the movement had reached
the national level, largely because of the publication ofA
Nation at Riskin 1983.
Americans had begun to question the quality of
their educational system in the 1960’s, when studies
of segregated schools revealed that students were
more likely to succeed when their schools had better
resources. At that time, the reform movement sought
more money for all public schools. In the 1970’s,
states began to be concerned about their budgets, so
theorists and politicians began looking into apply-
ing business principles to school management.
Rather than simply adding more money to school
budgets, state administrators looked for ways to make
education more cost-effective.
Respondents to a 1980 Gallup poll identified “low
standards” as one of the top four problems in schools,
and 79 percent of respondents favored teaching
morality in public schools. The U.S. Department of
Education had been founded by the Carter adminis-
tration in 1979. President Ronald Reagan’s initial in-
tention had been to dissolve the department, until
he realized he could use it to promote his agenda of
a “new federalism.” Reagan sought to use the depart-
ment to strengthen state education departments
and promote the idea of efficiency.
In 1982, Mortimer J. Adler, a classical philosopher
and leader of the Great Books movement (which
called for an education based upon certain texts
considered to have universal importance and qual-
ity), published thePaideia Proposal, an argument for
more rigorous standards in elementary education.
Adler called on public schools to teach children the
skills that would prepare them for a lifetime of self-
motivated learning. Allan Bloom, another classical
philosopher and Great Books theorist, published
The Closing of the American Mindin 1987, arguing that
public schools were more interested in teaching
moral and cultural relativism than in teaching basic
cultural concepts and that students who grew up
thinking of all truth as relative were incapable of
learning anything.
In 1983, the National Commission on Excellence
in Education issuedA Nation at Risk, warning that
American students were falling behind other na-
tions’ youth in math, science, and engineering. The
main “front” of the Cold War with the Soviet Union
was a competition over productivity and technologi-
cal advancement. Both nations sought to be the
world’s leader in scientific advancement and eco-
nomic growth. With the publication ofA Nation at
Risk, Americans feared that they were not only losing
the Cold War but also falling behind other countries
such as China and Japan. Reagan modified his atti-
tude toward the Department of Education and tasked
it with spearheading efforts to establish national
standards and accountability mechanisms. In 1985,
Reagan appointed William Bennett to be his new
secretary of education, and Bennett became one of
the main spokesmen for the standards movement.
The movement was criticized from all ends of
the political spectrum. Advocates of classical educa-
tional theories, while supporting the establishment
of higher educational standards, opposed using stan-
dardized tests to measure success. Adler, for exam-
ple, argued inSix Great Ideasthat a few minutes of
conversation is a far better gauge of a student’s
learning than is any standardized test. Libertarians
worried that the accountability movement would
become an excuse to expand the federal bureacra-
cy, while many religious conservatives feared that
educational standards would further marginalize
religion in American culture. Social progressives,
meanwhile, feared that standardization would stifle
independent thought and student creativity and that
accountability would compromise the integrity of
the teaching profession. They argued that standard-
ized tests unfairly penalized students who were ac-
ademically gifted and successful but performed
poorly on tests because of anxieties, learning disabil-
ities, or confusion about procedures.
Nevertheless, the first federally funded testing
program, the National Assessment of Education
Progress (NAEP), began in 1988. The decade ended
with President George H. W. Bush and the National
Governors’ Association meeting at the National Ed-
ucation Summit in Charlottesville, Virginia. There,The Eighties in America Standards and accountability in education 911