Introduction: the next wave of school reform.

• Author: Glastris, Paul

The school reform movement--the decades-old bipartisan drive to improve public education with standards and high-stakes tests--might seem, on the surface at least, to be running out of steam. Its crowning achievement, George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), which shook up public schools after it was passed in 2001, is now widely seen as flawed and in need of a massive overhaul. Yet efforts to do so have been stalled for years on Capitol Hill because of political disagreements over how to proceed. With reform in limbo, the Obama administration has been reduced to passing out Get Out of Jail Free cards to countless school districts that face penalties for failing to meet the law's strict targets for improvement. Meanwhile, liberals who were always uncomfortable with using standardized tests to judge student and teacher performance are increasingly in revolt against the whole school reform movement. And conservatives who never liked the increased federal role in education brought by NCLB are agitating for a return to local control.

Yet looks can be deceiving. The truth is that the standards-and-testing model of school reform is far from dead. In fact, it's about to kick into a new high gear, in ways that will alter what happens in the nation's classrooms as fundamentally as NCLB did, and probably more so. Unlike previous waves of school reform, which were debated in Congress and covered in depth by the press, this next one is the product of compacts among states and a quiet injection of federal money--and has therefore garnered almost no national attention. Consequently, few Americans have any idea about the profound changes that are about to hit their children's schools.

The reforms will unfold in three stages, each of which is explored by an article in this report.

In the first stage, already well under way, almost every state is instituting something called the "common core standards," a demanding new set of shared benchmarks that define what students should know and be able to do at the end of each grade. These benchmarks will replace a jumble of widely varying and often weak state standards that have hitherto guided America's schools.

The second stage, hard on the heels of the first, is the development of a new set of high-stakes tests based on these new standards. These tests are already being crafted by university and state education department experts across the country, and are scheduled to be rolled out beginning in 2014...