• Technical Standards cover the knowledge and skills workers need in different jobs.  Technical standards generally come out of vocational educational agencies or business/industry/labor organizations such as the National Institute for Automotive Service Excellence or the American Welding Society.
  
  
• Academic Standards cover traditional school subjects.  They can come from government (generally state Departments of Education) or professional associations; for example, the National Science Education Standards developed by the National Science Teachers Association.
  
  
• Employability Standards cover the skills and qualities needed in any job—thinking, problem-solving, communication, interpersonal, and technology skills and personal qualities or attributes such as responsibility and integrity.  They define the skills all workers need to function in a high-performance, 21st-century workplace environment; examples of these are the SCANS skills (Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills 1991) or Work Keys (ACT 2000).

In Minnesota, the BIG focus is on the Academic Standards (although the others exist) because they’re the standards being used to hold schools accountable. 

The Minnesota Academic Standards are Content Standards—they describe what learners should know and be able to do.  We used to have Performance Standards (Profiles of Learning) but it was too hard to standardize testing, so we threw them out.

The National Skill Standards and Assessment Collaborative (1998) recommends these processes:

• Include all key stakeholders. You need to ensure that standards meet everyone's needs—employers, employees, administrators, educators, parents, and students. Including everyone in the process allows everyone input.
  
  
• Involve the local employment community (e.g., employers, workers, unions, trade and professional associations).  This is particularly important—not only because it has vital knowledge about local skill requirements but also because it can be a valuable partner in providing technical assistance, classroom resources, industry experiences for educators, and advocacy of your new standards (Employment and Training Administration 1999).
  
  
• Use appropriate methods to review and validate. Standards should be reviewed and validated by groups other than those who drafted them or recommended adopting them. You might use an external review committee with representatives of all key stakeholders for feedback on content appropriateness, clarity, and usefulness; mail surveys for widespread feedback on relevance and importance; and/or focus groups of teachers, employers, and/or workers for more in-depth information.
  
  
• Pilot test and refine standards. Validated standards should be pilot tested to ensure that they are applicable and accessible to all learners; the pilot test should cover both instruction and assessment with diverse groups of both students and workers.

In 2003, the Minnesota State Legislature asked the Department of Education to create a process for writing new standards in math, science, reading and social studies when they decided to overturn the Profile of Learning.  The Department picked committees for each subject area.  The committees included community members, school administrators, teachers and parents. Unfortunately, there was very limited representation by public school parents.

The process for writing the standards varied with each committee.  Some committees used curriculum experts and national standards as guides, while others depended more heavily on parents and community members.  The committee process and composition was criticized.  Some thought the committees lacked input from teachers and experts in content areas.

After committees wrote draft standards, the standards were posted publicly.  A series of Town Hall meetings were held to gather public input on the standards.  This input was also collected on the Department of Education Web site. 

Once the community input was compiled, the standards writing committees were asked to review to the comments, edit and refine the standards.  How the committees did this and the extent to which they carefully considered the public input varied with each committee.

A final draft of the standards in each subject area was then submitted to the Legislature for final approval.  The standards for creative arts, math, and language arts passed in 2003.  The standards for science and social studies passed in 2004. 

The social studies standards were more controversial.  After considerable debate in the public and in the Legislature, a greatly revised version of the social studies standards passed the Legislature on the last day of the 2004 legislative session.

English Language Learner standards were developed by the Department of Education in 2003 to meet federal guidelines and must be revised to include the new science standards.

There are no state standards for physical education or world languages.

In Minnesota, that happens at the district-level.  In public education, district departments of “Curriculum & Instruction” are the industry equivalent of "Research & Development."  What's more, after the curriculum has been aligned to the new standards, districts are charged with oversight—evaluating the effectiveness of changes and making improvements.

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• Deciding the Standards—By and large the state pays the costs of deciding the standards (if you ignore the time and energy it takes for education professionals, parents and the public to monitor and/or participate in the process).
  
  
• Implementing the Standards—School districts absorb the costs of implementing the standards. The job of reorganizing curriculum programs around new standards can be enormous. In particular, considerable time may be needed to develop the new curriculum, new materials will likely need to be purchased to support delivering the new curriculum (and sometimes new equipment), and teachers need to be trained on the new content requirements and the best practices in teaching and learning to deliver them.  What’s more, assessments must be developed and implemented to make sure students are mastering the new material and ongoing improvements are made.
  
  School districts provide support in the form of policy, release time, resources, technical assistance, and professional development opportunities for staff, not only for initial development of standards-based curriculum components but also for keeping curriculum components scrupulously up-to-date.
  
  
• Measuring Results—School districts are responsible for making sure students are mastering the content, so they absorb the costs of testing and reporting at the local level; but the state is responsible for making sure the districts are doing a good job, so they absorb the costs of designing, validating and administering the tests (delivering them to and retrieving them from the districts), as well as compiling and communicating the test results statewide.

And, of course, every time we change the standards we get to pay for them all over again.

In the past, local school boards had more control over funding and more autonomy to determine what students should know.  As a result, the school board checked in with schools in many different ways (school visits, reports from principals and curriculum leaders, annual reviews, etc.) to see if schools were investing in student learning.

With No Child Left Behind and the 2001 transfer of school funding to the state, the Department of Education now has much more responsibility for setting up systems for accountability.  Today, MCA test scores are the primary way to determine whether school districts and schools are spending public education dollars wisely.

No Child Left Behind requires that students be tested in every grade (grades 3-8) and once in high school (grades 9-12).  the Minnesota Department of Education began with statewide tests in reading, math, and writing, and added science in 2008.  These tests are designed to show how well schools are teaching the academic standards, and are used to determine each school and district's Annual Yearly Progress.  The annual School Report Cards include both the school’s test results and the school’s financial information to help the local community decide whether or not the school is spending its dollars wisely.

In other content areas (physical education, world languages and the arts), individual districts are required to develop their own assessments to measure student knowledge of the content standards.  While these scores are not reported to the state, the school district is supposed to use the results of these assessments to measure how well their investment in these content areas is paying off.

There is a lot of debate about whether the statewide tests accurately measure how well a student or a school is performing on the academic standards, and thus, how well they are spending their money.  There have been problems with test validity, consistency in scoring, and reporting test results.  The most visible problem was inaccurate results being reported to the public in 2003.