A Statement of State Education CEOs, K-16

Toward A Truly Rational Society

From June 29 to July 2, 1997, teams of education leaders from eight states met in Aspen, Colorado to consider what they might do together to enhance the performance of the education systems of their states. They were chief executive officers of their states’ elementary and secondary education systems and of their states’ higher education systems. The underlying premise of their gathering was that only by acting together as leaders of unified integrated education systems could they deal effectively with the problems that cry out for reform of both elementary/secondary and postsecondary education. Some were already active partners in efforts across the range from kindergarten to college ("K-16"), while others were in the early stages of considering and forming such partnerships. These leaders were joined by representatives of the Education Trust and the Pew Charitable Trusts.

The following statements of objectives are intended to represent, at lease approximately, goals that each state team intends to pursue, each in its own way, in its home state, and that all of the Aspen attendees hope to join together to achieve ultimately across the nation.

The Overarching Goal: We aim to achieve in each of our states levels of performance by all students at elementary, secondary, and postsecondary levels that meet or exceed rigorous and realistic standards. These standards will need to be dynamic, changing, and increasing, as necessary, to reflect the changing needs of a globally competitive knowledge-based economy and society. In pursuing this goal, we will work to eliminate all significant performance gaps among students from different economic classes, genders, races, or ethnic groups.

Objectives: All of our objectives have to do with establishing and adhering to rigorous performance standards. So important do we perceive such standards to be that we would adopt them as our first principle. We believe that quality comes first, and that our partnerships and collaborative networks must have as one of their primary purposes helping us all to maintain the fortitude necessary to defend and uphold this principle.

Performance standards of four kinds are important:

1. Standards for students. In each of our states, we will establish rigorous performance standards for all students, and reliable and valid means of assessing their performance against such standards. These standards will be aligned and consistent across the boundaries between elementary, secondary and postsecondary education, and between all levels of education and the world of work. Transitions (graduations) from one level of education to another, and from educational institutions to employment, will depend in important and substantial ways on performance. That is, performance must have, and be seen to have, consequences.
2. Standards for teachers. We cannot expect students to meet standards their teachers cannot meet, nor can we expect poor teachers to produce knowledgeable and skilled graduates. The evidence is clear that we have in today’s classrooms some of the best prepared teachers we have ever had. But there is also incontrovertible evidence that too many of our present teachers are substantially underqualified to meet the challenge of helping all their students meet high performance standards. We believe that these deficiencies are so pervasive and that the urgency to address them is so great that nothing less than major redesign of the ways we educate new teachers and update current teachers will suffice.

Any plan for addressing this problem must effect changes in the preparation, induction into the profession, and continuing professional development of teachers. We have as yet no comprehensive plan, but believe it must include the following elements:

We will strive to professionalize the teacher’s calling. This means the establishment of licensure and certification mechanisms based on rigorous performance (not input or preparation) standards definied by the most accomplished and successful practitioners of the profession itself. It means that the only way into the profession is demonstrated performance on those standards. And it also means an absolute bar against the practice of the profession by an unlicensed or uncertified (i.e., unqualified) person (though there should be alternate routes to prepare for certification and licensure).

Teachers are educated by entire colleges and universities. These institutions as a whole – not just their schools of education – must take responsibility for and be held accountable for the performance of the teachers they teach. The graduates of our teacher training programs must be representative of our best. If that means they are too few to meet the demand, then so be it. Let that shortage drive change in those who seek to be and those who seek to employ teachers, as well as change in the way we organize teaching.

To achieve these ends, we must change the reward systems at all levels of education. Those systems must reward demonstrated performance and nothing else. Performance must have, and be seen to have, consequences for teachers as well as for students.

3. Standards for teacher education. Poorly designed programs are unlikely to yield high-performing teachers. Attention must be paid to enhancing our means for assessing program quality. Program approval and continuation should be linked primarily to program performance.
4. Standards for practice. If teaching is a profession (and we all agree it ought to be), then it must have enforceable standards of practice based on a solid foundation of sound research. Decades of good research in fields relevant to teaching have produced a huge literature, but its finding have not evolved into generally accepted standards of practice. Unlike other professional or disciplinary fields, pedagogical research has had too little effect on how most teachers teach. This deficiency requires our concerted attention.

None of the above types of performance standards can have any reality if we cannot determine how a student or a teacher or a program or a school is performing in terms of the standards. As a slogan once common at the National Bureau of Standards put it, "If you can’t measure it, you can’t make it, because if you can’t measure it you can’t tell whether you’ve got it made!" Research and the information and data it produces are crucial to the success of any reform effort in education. Open public sharing of comparative data is a sine qua non of education reform.

Finally, we share the view that the new information technology will surely soon transform every aspect of education at all levels. We do not pretend to understand exactly what effects this will have on our ability to deal with the issues outlined above. But we do believe that as we wrestle with them, information technology has the potential to remove or substantially modify many of the constraints and mandatory assumptions we would once have had to take into account. If we do not soon bring technology to bear on the problems at hand, others will.

What we face here is a massive long-term effort. It is important to approach it in ways that yield forward progress in some sectors in the near-term, in order to maintain momentum. We anticipate that this is most likely to occur first in the area of standards for students, including the development of performance-based graduation from high school and admission to colleges and universities. This is where most of us intend to focus our initial efforts.

Having said that, the need to produce more than two million new teachers during the coming decade provides us a unique opportunity to transform the profession. We will seize that opportunity to transform the profession. We will seize that opportunity, and begin at once to rethink the preparation, induction, and professional development of teachers in our states.

As we move ahead, it will be necessary to build a firm base of public support. All of us understand the need for us to become consistently and vigorously vocal in support of what we are attempting to do. This ought to be a welcome message, because surveys place reform of public education at the top of the public’s agenda of concerns. Nevertheless, our chances of success will be materially enhanced if we all proclaim the same message, consistently, repeatedly, and perpetually.

The exact nature of our action plans, of course, will vary from state to state, according to state needs and priorities. As we move ahead, however, we believe that our work will be enhanced if we continue to share with each other what we are learning. We are also more likely to succeed if we build on the many very thoughtful efforts that have gone before us. We intend to do both things.

SIGNED