The Iowa School Boards Foundation (ISBF) has conducted a multi-year study of standards and assessments in Iowa Districts and in the state of Iowa and the fifty states. In the first year of the study, ISBF studied the local standards of districts in Iowa. They examined the standards for comprehensiveness (completeness) and rigor (cognitive demand). The Foundation team found that many district standards were missing significant content and that there was a wide range of rigor. More specifically, Variation is large, in both content and rigor, among district standards in Iowa, when compared to model national standards, many districts’ standards are lacking content and rigor, and less than one-third of districts’ standards are comprehensive and rigorous like the model national standards. In the second year of the study, ISBF staff identified five states making large achievement gains and gap closures, studied those states’ policies, products, and practices in standards, assessment, and accountability, and compared and contrasted those five states with Iowa. When comparing the five high performing states to Iowa, all five have significantly more rigorous standards, four of the five have significantly more rigorous assessments, and all five have more accountability policies and practices in place.
In the third year of the team turned its attention to the Iowa Core Curriculum (ICC). First they examined the ICC for comprehensiveness and rigor. Then they make comparisons of the ICC to the current Iowa standards and to those of the five identified states. They found the ICC is significantly more rigorous than the Iowa standards and roughly as rigorous as the state standards of the states we identified as strong in improving achievement and closing gaps.