What are academic standards?
Content standards are statements that define expectations for students in terms of knowledge and skills. They provide details for more general, abstract educational goals.

Where did they come from?
School reform in this country has focused on standards-based education since the publication in 1983 of A Nation at Risk by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, which was followed by the setting of broad national goals for education in 1990. Throughout the ’90s, national subject-matter organizations have established standards in their respective areas. The movement has acquired momentum at the state-level as well, and almost every state has now adopted academic standards. The Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) were implemented in Texas public schools in the fall of 1998.

Do all schools use standards?
No. Many states now require standards in public schools. Private schools are not bound by these standards, although the best ones have adopted them. All national standards are voluntary. A list of curriculum topics, however detailed, should not be confused with a formal standards-based curriculum. Creating and adopting standards is a process that requires aligning textbooks and other curriculum materials with the chosen standards, planning carefully with teachers to implement them, and formulating plans to measure results. It is a process in which a new school often has an advantage over established schools that can be resistant to change.

What standards does Torah Day School of Dallas use?
We use the well-regarded TEKS standards as a base for most subjects, supplementing with national standards in key areas. Texas standards are among only a handful in the nation that have been labeled “exemplary” in at least one area by Achieve, Inc., an independent, non-profit organization founded after the 1996 National Education Summit to help states raise academic standards. The national standards used by TDSD have been drawn from the Mid-continent Research and Evaluation of Learning (McREL), an organization that has compiled the challenging lists of standards of national research institutions in mathematics, science, social studies and Language Arts.

Why are academic standards important?
The general purpose of standards is to define clearly what is to be taught and what kind of performance is expected. Schools whose curriculum goals simply list topics to be covered, as opposed to clear and challenging standards, are vulnerable to low expectations in individual classrooms and confusion over goals. Standards-based school reform is committed to:Affirming that a high achievement level for all students, regardless of their backgrounds, is a worthy and attainable goal;Affirming that when high expectations are set, children will rise to the challenge;Affirming that while school should be pleasant and interesting, it should also require hard work, and not just entertaining projects and activities;Providing, through publicly-shared standards, a focus and common vocabulary that will make it easier for parents and teachers to work together and will give parents a closer connection to their child’s learning.

How can the same standards serve slower and more advanced students?
Not all students will reach benchmarks at the same time, and some will require different teaching strategies and resources. Content standards are paired as often as possible within the curriculum with performance standards, which identify multiple levels of achievement (for example, basic, proficient, advanced) for a single standard. Standards-based education is based on the premise that all students, not just those in the top 25 percent, deserve a great education.

Research on school reform in the last decade has raised questions about the type of Gifted and Talented program that pulls out a few select children from each classroom for an hour or so of supplemental work each week. These programs often lack academic rigor, and the meaningful impact of them even on the children who participate has not been proved. By contrast, when the entire curriculum is aligned with specific standards—ways to measure reading with comprehension, writing with clarity and meaning, solving problems creatively, etc.—there is clear process for every student to continue to climb to a higher level.

Is there anything controversial about standards?
There is now widespread agreement among educational experts that specific, rigorous, teachable and measurable standards are key to school improvement.

Controversy has emerged over some of the state standardized assessments that have been developed for specific sets of standards, such as the TAAS (soon to be TAKS) tests that accompany TEKS in Texas public schools. Critics charge that using test scores to rank schools and to determine student promotion skews the curriculum by giving teachers a high motive to teach to the state test. This practice, many believe, is pedagogically flawed. It should be noted, however, that standards, including the TEKS standards, encompass many more areas than can be assessed on any one test, and that the value in the standards themselves is well established.

Torah Day School of Dallas does not plan to administer the state TAAS/TAKS exams. The academic standards used by TDSD have been aligned to curriculum products, including course-based assessments, by professional education organizations, so that student progress in meeting the standards can be measured within the classroom. In addition, TDSD will administer national norm-referenced achievement tests such as Terra Nova, ITBS and CAT/5.