The Minnesota Legislature has begun consideration of a bill (HF 2/SF 60) that would repeal the state's current K-12 education standards, known as the Profile of Learning, and require that they be replaced with rigorous, content-based standards in core academic subjects.

The importance of this legislation is rooted in the crucial role that standards must play in establishing real accountability for our public education system. As the respected Fordham Foundation succinctly put it, "The quest for educational accountability relies on a three-legged stool: standards, assessments, and consequences."

Standards define the desired results of schooling - what we expect students to know and be able to do. Assessments, including tests directly linked to the standards, are critical to understanding whether students, teachers, and schools are meeting the standards. Finally, standards and assessments should be coupled with consequences, including advancement or remediation for students and rewards or intervention for schools.

A state that establishes poor education standards risks building its entire education accountability system on a shaky and damaged foundation. If standards are not clear, challenging, measurable, and understandable, it is unlikely that tests will effectively align with them and provide reliable assessments of student progress. If assessments do not accurately measure achievement, than students, teachers, and schools could face invalid and unfair consequences.

As Minnesota seeks to develop better education standards and assessments -- as well as comply with the No Child Left Behind Act, a new federal education law that requires states to have accountability systems in place -- it is abundantly clear that the Profile of Learning does not provide a solid foundation for improving public education.

Several national education organizations and many Minnesota teachers have reviewed or commented on the Profile of Learning. The result - as seen in the excerpts below - has been a critical consensus regarding the poor quality of the state's current standards:

Achieve, Inc. and the Council for Basic Education
"The Profile has significant weaknesses that compromise many of its innovative goals: The standards lack clarity and specificity; important topics are missing or underemphasized; there is inadequate rigor and growth across grade levels; and the focus and manageability of the standards is weakened by the broad nature of the standards and the large number of learning areas."
--Aiming Higher: A Report on Education Standards and Policy for Minnesota. www.achieve.org

Fordham Foundation
Grade for Minnesota Standards: D-
"[A] large number of [English] standards are not specific, measurable, or demanding. Moreover, literary study gets short shrift in these pages, and academic writing is skimpily described. . . . It is not possible to find in these [math] standards a plain statement of whether students are to learn the multiplication tables, the algorithms for the common arithmetic operation, the quadratic formula, anything at all about Euclidean geometry . . . , or about conditional probability."
--The State of State Standards 2000. www.edexcellence.net

American Federation of Teachers
"In the English standards, there are no writing conventions and vague reading basics at all levels. In social studies, U.S. and world history standards are missing at the elementary and middle levels and are vague at the high school level."
--Making Standards Matter 2001. www.aft.org

Education Week
Grade for Minnesota Standards: D-
The grade is based on an evaluation of whether the "state has standards that are clear, specific, and grounded in content" in four core academic subjects.
--Quality Counts 2003. www.edweek.org

University of Minnesota teacher survey
"Many teachers cited specific examples of lost content; entire chapters or units that had been cut in order to have enough class time for students to complete performance packages."

"The teachers were most critical of what they perceived to be excessive record-keeping associated with performance-based evaluation and CFL reporting requirements. . . . Another [teacher] explained: . . . 'This extra time the teachers need to put in does not improve the students' education in any way. I see it as busywork, paperwork, unnecessary bureaucratic requirements.'"

"Teachers noted that there were too many standards, and that many of the components were unclear. . . Teachers also expressed frustration with the lack of clarity in the standards statements. Teachers often had difficulty knowing how to translate the vague language of the standards and packages into their own classroom activities."

--The Impact of Minnesota’s "Profile of Learning" on Teaching and Learning in English and Social Studies Classrooms. College of Education and Human Development, April 30, 2002.

-- Morgan Brown is Senior Fellow for Education Policy at Center of the American Experiment. He can be reached at morgan@amexp.org or 612-338-3605.