Standards and Accountability in Washington State

Abstract

In the early 1990s, Washington State was in the vanguard of the standards movement. Democratic governor Booth Gardner and leaders of the Washington Roundtable?a coalition of business leaders? agreed to press for a comprehensive statewide education reform package modeled after Kentucky's. David Hornbeck, who drafted the Kentucky con sent decree that started the standards-based reform movement, advised on drafting of the state's reform bill. An omnibus reform package was passed in early 1993. By 1994, the National Business Roundtable rated Washington as one of four states that had enacted the most complete standards-based reform program. Washington political and business leaders intended to transform public education from a bureaucracy controlled by mandates and enforced compli ance into a performance-based system. They envisioned standards-based reform as a rational approach to improving public education. They sought to set standards that define what children need to know and be able to do, develop measurement systems to test performance against those standards, help schools find and use methods of instruction effective enough to allow them to meet the standards, give schools the freedom of action necessary to adjust their methods of instruction to meet student needs, and reward schools that meet standards and punish those that do not. Like proponents of standards-based reform in other states, Washington State policy and business leaders assumed that establishment of a perfor mance-based system would change the behavior of teachers, parents, school administrators, and students.1 Teachers and parents, informed by the stan 199