Standards-Based Reform and Rural School Improvement: Finding the Middle Ground

improvement efforts that emphasize locally-responsive, place-based curricula. While the two movements differ in philo-sophicalorientation, they share the following goals: increasing equity in schools, making curricula and pedagogy intel-lectually rigorous, and creating content and opportunity-to-learn standards. They differ in that the standards-based movement advocates the development ofstate and national standards tied to a testing and accountability program, while rural school improvement advocates believe that all standards should be developed locally and that student assessment should be designed to provide instructional feedback to teachers. The author proposes that advocates of the two ap-proaches to school improvement work together to create a school reform movement that will lead to better schools and communities than either movement can create on its own. Since the 1980s, there has developed in the U.S. a push for national and/or state academic standards defining what students should know and be able to do by the time they graduate from high school. The movement evolved out of a call for education reform sparked by the 1983 publica-tion of A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excel-lence in Education). When initial reform efforts following