An interview with co-founder Leslye A.
Arsht
Nothing is routine or ordinary about StandardsWork, Inc., an organization that - through continued refinement and
experience - remains at the forefront of education reform, 14 years after its launch. Co-founder Leslye A. Arsht had
the vision to put it there.
In her 30-year-career in communications and education policy, Arsht has wrestled with many aspects of education
reform, working to see that policy and practice come together to improve education for all children. StandardsWork
is the centerpiece of her efforts to help communities across the country provide their children with a quality education.
From Goal Line, the first education reform online network, to the newly created Parent Power Works, StandardsWork
continues to evolve in ways that press education reform forward.
The seeds of StandardsWork were planted in 1991 when Arsht helped U.S. Department of Education Secretary Lamar
Alexander promote America 2000. That initiative was then-President George H. W. Bush's campaign to engage communities
in education reform. One of the six national education goals reflected in that strategy was that American students
leave grades four, eight, and twelve "having demonstrated competency in challenging subject matter including English,
mathematics, science, history and geography."
"When I got to the U.S. Department of Education, Lamar
Alexander had just launched a major effort to rally folks
around the national education goals. He was recommending some
pretty big changes in education - a kind of Bill of Rights
and Responsibilities for parents," Arsht said. "The
under-pinning of that movement for school reform was academic
standards - based on a vision the nation's governors had actually
produced themselves when now Senator Alexander and Bill Clinton
were vice-chairs of the National Governors Association," Arsht
said. "The White House picked up that vision and took it down
the road with the notion that you could work with communities
and they would take responsibility for their schools."
The America 2000 plan called for engaging communities in improving schools by having them advocate for using proven
practices, but the education establishment opposed most of the steps.
"The resistance was often about power and control; the
traditional system is organized for the benefit and convenience
of adults in the system. Reformers were trying to put student
learning at the center of the educational enterprise and to
hold the adults accountable for making that happen. But, unless
you had a very sophisticated 'ear' or an understanding of
education, it was - and is - difficult to differentiate the
protector of the status quo of education from the reformer.
The vocabulary is hard to decipher.
"Reformers like me were demonized by critics who said
reformers were undermining public schools by standardizing
them," Arsht said. "In fact, academic standards offer the
best tools for managing learning in creative ways." But, it
was very easy, in the beginning, to distort the motives of
reformers."
Arsht said she realized an organization outside government was needed to mobilize the kind of movement required to
produce a groundswell for change.
"What was needed was a vision of how to engage people
outside of schools to improve education. Once I learned that
a whole body of literature existed that defined what schools
should be doing to improve performance and that (by and large)
schools weren't using these research-driven practices, I knew
what I wanted to be doing," Arsht said. "My idea was to create
a network of organizations that could rally their employees,
customers, their chapters, all of their grassroots, to recognize
what a good school looks like, support those schools, and
change the ones that aren't there yet.
"Most people can't distinguish a good school from a poor
one - they just want to support the system, even if that means
closing their eyes to the plight of disadvantaged children
and a terrible achievement gap in this country," Arsht said.
"Poor kids often end up with the least prepared teachers,
the weakest curriculum choices, and the lowest performance.
It didn't take long to figure out that the federal government
was the wrong entity to use to try to mobilize the public
about these things.
"I left the U.S. Department of Education to start a non-profit
education organization to help policymakers, school districts,
schools and parents better understand what a good school looks
like and to help them engage other stakeholders in creating
them."
To create that network, Arsht left the education department and started the nonprofit America 2000 Coalition, a
national effort to support the national education goals by linking businesses and social-service organizations to
local school-reform efforts. The organization operated under that name for about two years. The Coalition identified
and engaged about 200 groups, from professional associations to trade associations to individual businesses and
philanthropists, and began identifying best practices so parents and educators could visualize what a good school
looks like.
Following a change in leadership at the White House and the U.S. Department of Education, education reform issues
continued but under slightly different names. In 1993, America 2000 became Goals 2000, and the America 2000 Coalition
became the Coalition for Goals 2000.
"There was a key difference," Arsht said. "America 2000
focused on demands for change coming from outside the system;
Goals 2000 focused on keeping power inside the system. So,
Goals 2000 softened the edge of change by allowing those inside
the system to retain control of the reform. Starting in 1993,
it became clearer to me that making demands from outside the
school alone was not sufficient, that you really needed champions
inside school systems to make change happen."
Being able to work within the political shifting sands has characterized StandardsWork's history and has been one
of the key factors in keeping the organization nimble.
Because national voluntary standards had not taken hold, the first tool developed by the Coalition was Goal Line, an
education reform online network to spread the word about effective or exemplary programs and to help communities set
their own standards.
"Goal Line was developed before the web but used all
the mechanisms of the internet," Arsht said. "We even taught
people how to use a modem. We ended up with hundreds of subscribers
and programs to promote initially. The network highlighted
after-school programs, church programs, and math and literacy
programs used inside the classroom and to supplement the school
day. Many are still winning awards today.
"Our initial footprint was the ability to identify the
kind of information that people could use to make them better
teachers, better parents. We were focused on building demand
for better standards in school. Goal Line was at the cutting
edge, but we were forced to give it up as free content became
ubiquitous on the web."
In 1993, The Walton Family Foundation, a long-time funder
of Coalition activities, including the major initial underwriting
of Goal Line, asked the Coalition to manage a two-year grant
funding the development of a How To book and companion
CD-ROM that lays out the process and content of standards-setting
at the community and state levels. The goal was to create
a framework in which communities, districts, schools and even
states could participate in a self-guided standards-setting
process.
Published in 1995 and co-authored by Denis P. Doyle and Susan
Pimentel, Raising the Standard: An Eight-Step Action Guide
for Schools and Communities, was written not only for
schools and school districts but also for parents and business
and civic leaders who want to move beyond setting standards
to implementing them. It was the first time any educational
publisher had the whole book on CD-ROM and live links to programs
mentioned in the book. It is still used - and is still effective
- today.
"Now everybody is talking about these things," Arsht
said, "but 10 years ago, these were all new and radical ideas.
We set out to do two things: define what kids should know
and then articulate and measure it. When you are clear about
those expectations, students are more likely to get them."
During the writing of the book, Arsht teamed up with Pimentel, a nationally recognized education analyst and standards
consultant, to co-found StandardsWork as a project of the Coalition for Goals 2000. Arsht said this new project and name
lent a new clarity to StandardsWork's direct consulting services, helping states, districts and schools use the book to
set and implement standards. It also removed any confusion about StandardsWork as an advocate for any particular government
initiative.
The education reform Arsht and StandardsWork advocated was
never a matter of politics or ideology. "Partisan politics
have never helped education reform," Arsht said. "Both
parties are wrong on this issue about half the time."
StandardsWork wanted to be seen as an ally of public education and student achievement, not as an extension
of the federal government.
"As the standards movement began to take hold, there
was a huge tension between state and national standards. People
used politics in destructive ways to confuse people and keep
people at bay. The schools and communities were often at odds.
StandardsWork became an antidote to a lot of that," Arsht
said.
StandardsWork challenged contemporaneous conventional wisdoms by advocating reform principles, most of which are
quite commonsensical:
- Disadvantaged children should have a rigorous curriculum and well-prepared teachers so they could succeed, rather
than the "dumbed down" variety they typically get;
- Phonics-based instruction helps all students read;
- All students should take algebra (even if they don't do well) because it teaches them to think in abstract ways;
- Teacher and student absences should be monitored as part of an accountability system because when teachers and
kids are missing a lot of school, little learning occurs.
Through the years StandardsWork has moved with skill and practicality through every aspect of education reform, from
- writing the standards, to
- implementing the standards, to
- aligning instruction, to
- adopting the textbooks, to
- organizing and training community groups to advocate for parents, to
- being sure parents at the local level understand their rights under NCLB, to
- data analysis and data driven instruction.
"In the late 90s, as the standards movement was taking
hold but still well before No Child Left Behind, we did a
lot of work with state departments of education and local
school districts helping them write and build staff buy-in
for standards," Arsht said. "There is no piece of it (standards
and accountability) we haven't worked on. We were early advocates
for clear, specific rigorous standards. We were advocates
of getting standards into clear, tight, specific statements.
And we've always championed assessments that measure progress.
"We focused on developing tools and processes that would
make it easier to use best practices."
In addition to Goal Line, other tools created by StandardsWork include the Results Card and HireStandards,
a system to identify high-performing education leaders.
"The Results Card project involved us in the nitty gritty
of school accountability and put StandardsWork in a position
of advocating for multiple measures of achievement," Arsht
said. "The project really was a precursor to No Child Left
Behind, and it illustrated once more that StandardsWork has
been unique in its ability to identify both the next challenges
in education reform and appropriate strategies for overcoming
them. With HireStandards, we made very public our commitment
to certain strategies and developed a profile of the attitudes
and attributes of successful, reform-minded school leaders.
"Parent Power Works has brought us full circle from where
StandardsWork originally began," Arsht said. "It's an intersection
between public policy and where real people live their lives.
These community organizations we're working with already have
families coming to them, but they don't know anything about
education reform. We know these parents want their children
to be in good schools so they can get ahead - and we are determined
to get information in their hands so they can recognize what
a good school is and do what has to be done to provide that
for their child.
"StandardsWork wants to identify what people need to
know about education reform so they can act on their demand
for better schools," Arsht said. "They have to know what do
to and how to do it.
"Teaching local community organizations how to be advocates
for these parents was a critical closing of the circle for
us."
But for Arsht, the circle just expands. She spent nine months (2003-'04) helping Iraqis rebuild their school
system. As senior advisor to the Ministry of Education in Iraq, she found her many years of experience with
education reform in the United States applied equally well in a once-proud but now severely neglected education
system in the Middle East..
Her efforts to improve education for all children continue.
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