Making the connection: a decade of standards-based reform and achievement

Education Week published the first edition of its annual Quality Counts reports in 1997. The annual report card on public education in the 50 states and the District of Columbia was conceived to help monitor state progress in adopting the core elements of standards-based reform, an approach to educational improvement that had started to take hold across the nation. Key levers of that strategy include establishing academic standards for what students should know and be able to do, aligning assessments to those standards, implementing accountability measures, and providing supports to improve teacher quality. In some respects, Quality Counts has spent the last decade focused primarily on answering one basic, but important, question: Have the states adopted policies that support standardsbased education?