Opportunity to Learn Standards

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The most widely advocated model of national eduational reform envisions national standards for student outcomes, curricular content and student assessment. States will be expected to reflect national standards in their own state-leve structures and provide guidance, support, technical assistance and monitoring to ensure that standards are adopted and implemented in the local districts. Local districts, finally, will be responsible for the local schools that will educate our children to standards that equal of surpass the national standards.

But what of the manu school - espescilly the schools characterized by inequities - that cannot begin to meet the National Content and Assessment Standards (Eisner 1993)? In Congress, as well as among advocates of eduational excellence and educational equity, strong voices are insisting that standards must include Opportunity to Learn Standards that take into account educational inputs and processes, not simply conent and outcomes. These advocates recognize a responsibility to provide schools with access to knowledge, training, technical assistance, consulting and other forms of support necessary to develop local and state capacity. To define and achieve these standards, it will be necessary to develop local and state federal human resource programs within the Department of Education and to find avenues for collaboration among federal, state and local education systems in a coordinated effort to meet the varied needs of children at their local schools.

Delivery of educational opportunities (especially those defined by high-level content and high expectations of student outcomes) includes a number of elements and processes. Each of these must be assessed and designed on the bases of Opportunity to Learn Standards that are effective in bringing the benefits of educational reform to all students. Federal and state leadership could undertake the design of the following Opportunity to Learn Standards:

• Resource Standards to assure that all schools have sufficient resources to deliver high level of curriculum content and to achieve higher levels of outcomes for all students;

• Curriculum Delivery Standards to assure high levels of curriculum delivery to all students;

• Outcome and Capacity Building Standards to assure that all schools have the continued capacity to deliver quality education and are evaluated by their delivery of quality educational opportunities to all students.

These standards would include attention to such areas as:

Research Standards for:
• Implementing and monitoring equitable finance formulas for within and between-schools, and within and between-districts;
• Coordinating equitable health and human services support and providing opportunities to local resources and services;
• Establishing adequate facilities, including play space, classroom space, materials and equipment, libraries, science laboratories, and fine and performing arts facilities;
• Providing a safe, orderly, drug-free environment;
• Providing district and state support to assist in achieving equal access to schools' educational benefits (e.g., special programs such as accelerated learning);
• Providing ongoing training necessary to assure teacher competency in both the cognitive and affective domains;
• Providing equal access to curriculum materials, technology and data. Curriculum Delivery Standards for:
• State, district and local alignment of curriculem, instruction, assessment and staff developmetn proven effective with children of both genders and diverse linguistic and cultural groups;
• Challenging content coverage (e.g., access to challenging curriculum, time on task, continuity, integration);
• Content emphasis for individual student of groups of students (e.g., expectations of students' capacity to learn);
• Use of appropriate and varied teaching techniques and strategies (e.g., has variety of approaches, encourages active and collaborative learning, introduces new skills, reviews skills taught, gives appropriate feedback to students, includes self-evaluation process, etc.);
• Developmetn or selection of instructional materials and technology;
• Teacher knowledge of subject matter conent and pedagogy (e.g., subject credentials, certification, professional experiences);
• Equal access of all students to schools' most challenging programs of curriculum.

  Outcome and Capacity Building Standards for:

• Ongoning, multiple-forms of continuous curriculum-based student assessmetns that are free of gender, culture and language bias;
• Collection, interpretation and usage of data (disaggregated by grade, race, gender, ethnicity, language characteristics, and socioeconomic status) measuring student's opportunity to learn and resulting outcomes, including participation, attendance, test and assessment outcomes, and graduation rates;
• Continuing access to eductational research and pedagogy information;
• Continued assessment of bias in institutional and classroom practices, text books and educational materials, and assessment procedures and instruments;\
• Cyclical district and school improvement processes based upon measuring of opportunity to learn;
• Effective technical assistance to schools;
• Funding of school in-service professional training and development that familiarizes teachers and parents with standards and develops their capacity;
• Monitoring district and school improvement processes;
• Timely identification and corrective assistance for schools that fail to meet standards;
• Recognition and reinforcement of school successes;
• Organizational structures that permit and encourage staff to learn from experience and from each other.

To ensure that a vast majority of students achieve to the established standard, state departments of education and school districts need to conceptualize strategies in areas of school management, learning environment and community support and involvement.

School Management:
• External and internal dissemniation of ongoing and multiple forms of school-based assessments that evaluate a student's opportunity to learn (e.g., policies, programs and procedures, and school services);
• Ensuring that assessments that are tied to curriculum and instruction are used for the purpose of improving teaching, learning, and educational planning;
• Inter- and intra-district articulation among schools, agencies, business and institutions of higher education;
• Interstate and interdistrict articulation for families and agencies serving mobile students;
• Alignment of responsibility, authority, and accountability so that decisions regarding students' movement toward standard are made closest to the learner;
• Creation of integrated and coherent approaches to recruit and retain minority teachers;
• Establishing benchmarks and timelines for improved student performance and progress;
• Implementing actions to improve schools not meeting state content standards.

  Learning Environment:

• Coherent, multicultural gender-fair, interdisciplinary curricula and instruciton;
• School and classroom environments conductive to student thinking, initiative development and individualization;
• Quality and quantity of multicultural and multilingual instructional and support materials;
• Flexible class size, grouping and scheduling;
• Special programs for students (e.g., parenting education);
• Coordination and inter/intra-district articulation of instructional and curriculum standards for mobile and limited English proficient students.

  Community Support and Involvement:

• Assessmetn of student/community/staff characteristics and needs, including the languages spoken in the community;
• Focusing public and private community resources on prevention and early intervention;
• Utilizing the school to empower families through coordinating access to social services and providing a necessary health, nutrition, and human services safety net to assure that all students are ready to learn;
• Bringing students out into the community on ways that provide experiences with museums, colleges and universities, businesses and agencies'
• Providing information and support to students' families in ways that make it possible for them to become involved in their children's education as well as in the school reform process.

Schools charged with implementing curricula of high academic content cannot be expected to succeed without the kind of standards and strategies described above. State adoption and implementation of the Opportunity to Learn Standards outlined above can provide badly needed guidance for local education agency and school restructuring. State and local governments must collaborate to build models of school reform that create a truly systemic approach to American education. This approach must set clear and high goals for our children's education and assure comprehensive and adequate resources and supports to the teachers and other educational professionals responsible for creating children's day-to-day opportunities to learn.

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