The recognition that schools must change their objectives for learning is reflected in one of the most important things to emerge from the school reform movement of the 1980s-a general consensus that U.S. schools should move toward "world class" national standards describing what a student should know and be able to do at different grade levels. To date, the content of education has often been a hit-or-miss proposition in the United States. Whenever a student moved, a teacher could never be sure just what he or she learned in a previous school. Parents had little idea what levels their children were expected to reach year after year.

In the 1970s and 1980s, many states and localities put in place minimum competency standards centered on low-level skills and scattered factual knowledge. But while these standards raised the performance of the students who had been doing worst on standardized tests, they did little to meet the broader needs of these students or their higher-performing peers.

Today, alliances of teachers and professional education organizations have developed or are developing national standards in mathematics, the arts, science, English, history, geography, foreign languages, civics, and physical education. These standards are voluntary and are meant to be adapted to the unique characteristics and needs of each classroom. Still, for the first time in this nation's history, they establish high national benchmarks toward which all schools, teachers, and students can aspire.

The development of national standards and the explosion of information technologies uniquely suited to education are occurring simultaneously, and each can build on the other. The national standards must be geared toward a future when technology will permeate our everyday lives. Technology, in turn, provides a means for students to achieve the standards. If standards establish goals for education, then technology provides a means to achieve those goals.

The cooperative development and widespread voluntary adoption of national standards will have a profound effect on American education. Striving for national standards will demand major changes in the ways that teachers and other educators are trained and sustained throughout their careers. It will require that all students be given the opportunity to learn, because it is unjust to hold students to high national standards and not give them the means to attain those standards. In this way, national standards touch upon virtually all aspects of education and provide the framework for system-wide reform.

In response to the many reports of serious inadequacies in U.S. schools, national thinking about the state of K-12 education underwent a remarkable change in the 1980s. The governors of various states emerged at the forefront of educational reform, turning the call for action into measurable changes within their states. By decade's end, the governors and President Bush had agreed to establish standards and performance goals to be in place by the year 2000-a process that has been formalized in the Goals 2000 legislation passed by Congress and signed by President Clinton. In contrast to earlier reform activities, today's systemic reform efforts are broad-based, deeply rooted, and cognizant of the need to have national standards implemented through local reform. They recognize the need to support all components of the educational system consistently and continuously. Over this same period information technology has moved from an era of mainframes to local area networks and network connectivity. By coupling the wider use of technology in education to the systemic reform effort and by using the emerging curriculum standards as guides to the development of educational software, new models of K-12 education can be catalyzed.