Testimony on Opportunity-to-learn Standards presented to NGA Task Force on Education

This forum discusses opportunity-to-learn (OTL) standards. Colorado Governor Roy Romer questions education experts on OTL standards in an effort to see if they might be useful to Colorado. In this excerpt where Al Shanker testifies and is questioned, both Shanker and Romer have a hard time arriving at an exact definition of OTL standards, though they agree that they treat, to some degree, the idea that all schools and all students should be given an equal opportunity to learn and that disparities that might have a negative effect on the opportunity to learn should be erased. For instance, an OTL standard might be that all elementary schools should have science labs. Shanker does not condemn OTL standards, but he asserts that other efforts at school reform should not be delayed while waiting for each school to build a lab. If reform waited until every school had equal resources, Shanker fears nothing would get done. Shanker advocates for a flexible implementation of such standards.

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