SOME SCHOOL STANDARDS CALLED TOO VAGUE.

Byline: Deb Riechmann Associated Press 

Nearly every state in America is working to set scholastic goals for students, but a national teachers union says some are too vague and will leave teachers and students uncertain about what to teach and learn.

Forty-eight states and the District of Columbia are developing standards, according to a report by the American Federation of Teachers being released today at its convention here. Iowa and Wyoming are leaving the standards issue in the hands of local districts and are not setting up statewide academic benchmarks.

The union report comes four months after a national education summit in New York where the nation's governors vowed to set world-class standards for American schoolchildren.

``There is a commitment here to setting standards, and that should not be minimized, but not all standards are equal, and not all are getting the job done,'' said Matt Gandal, a senior associate in the AFT's educational issues department and author of the report.

In one state, a history standard said: ``Students should be able to identify and explain how events and changes occurred in significant historical periods.''

Another, stronger history standard requires students to: ``Describe how U.S. federalism was transformed during the Great Depression by the policies of the New Deal and how that transformation continues to affect U.S. society today.''

``If it's not usable and clear, it's not going to be seen as a tool that teachers can use,'' said Colleen Bielecki, director of professional issues for the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers and a former teacher in Lincoln, R.I. ``We have seen a lot of things developed over the years that end up sitting on a shelf.''

The report also found that:

Fewer than half the states include consequences for students who don't meet the standards, or require students to pass high school graduation exams linked to the standards.

Only 10 states fund programs to help low achievers make the grade.

Just three states require districts and schools to use standards and assessments as a factor in determining whether students should be promoted into certain grades.

Only nine states make students pass graduation tests linked to standards in all four core subjects.

``In this case, we'd have to agree with the AFT,'' says Chester Finn, a senior fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute. ``Our impression from the standards we've seen is that they're uneven. We have found that they are indeed nebulous and lacking in specific criterion.''

Many of the state standards do not set the academic bar high enough, Finn says. And those that aren't clear fail to give adequate guidance to teachers and test makers.

Setting standards is only half the battle. The states must find ways to test the students to find out if they've mastered the material written in the new standards.

This is a complicated task that is going to take the states longer than writing the standards, said Chris Pipho, state policy expert for the Education Commission of the States, a Denver-based education research and policy organization financed by state governments.