What do students know anyway? High school graduates’ examination of standards and the responses of expert educators for educational equity

Abstract

The standards movement in the US has ballooned over the past generation of education reforms to the extent that standards have become a prominent feature of the educational architecture. Most curriculum planning is informed by local, state, and/or interstate content area standards. While the 1980s central focus on the international competitiveness of US education has waxed and waned somewhat, the practice of comparative analysis has persisted. As such, there has been a steady rise in the debates regarding the achievement gap between White and non-Asian minority students. Educational reformers, politicians, reformers, and pundits have all taken varied positions regarding the effectiveness of the standards movement to ameliorate the polarization of achievement among these groups. Yet the voices of those at the epicenter of the teaching and learning process have often gone ignored and not heard from. This article addresses these perspectives to reveal that a national sample of high school graduates holds a particular assessment of standards with regard to equity, student learning, and educational quality. Expert educators’ responses to graduates’ perceptions are found equally important for guiding educational policy and improvement.