Chapter 3: The Challenge of Developing Content Standards

Standards-based initiatives have been the centerpiece of educational reform in theUnited States for well over a decade. The term standards encompasses several ele-ments of curricular reform, including content standards, performance standards, and opportunity-to-learn standards. This review focuses primarily on content standards, documents that define what students should know and be able to do in given subject areas. The story of content standards is a national story, a state story, a story of spe-cific disciplines, and a story of philosophical and theoretical shifts and differences that have had an impact on views of teaching and learning across disciplines. Content standards represent ideas about what disciplinary content is most important for stu-dents to know and be able to do across years of schooling. However, content stan-dards are also ideological, reflecting values and beliefs regarding the nature of teaching and learning and, more generally, the purposes of education. Tracing the interplay of ideas and values in standards and standards development—or, in other words, exam-ining the intellectual roots of content standards and the debates that inform their development and use—reveals the complexities inherent in this aspect of standards-based reform.