1. The curriculum lays out a learning continuum showing the progression and development of knowledge and skills from grade to grade.
Helping students make connections between something they have learned previously and the new content they are about to study has always been a central aspect of good teaching. Such connections make possible the transfer of knowledge to new situations and encourage critical thinking in students. Teachers need to know the prerequisite skills and knowledge students must have to learn the content that they are presenting. It is also important for teachers to understand how what they are teaching relates to the knowledge and skills students must acquire at subsequent grade levels if they are to reach high standards.

A curriculum with a good continuum illustrates how the core content areas can be integrated to make the most of valuable instructional time. It includes references to the lessons or units where related standards and/or relevant content can be found. The curriculum identifies what content the student will be prepared to tackle once he or she has understood the content in question. Within grades, this can be accomplished by describing "curriculum units" that contain more than one related lesson plan.

2. The state identifies instructional resources—reading materials, textbooks, software, etc.—that are aligned to the standards.
States must ensure that materials (textbooks, literature, software) are aligned to the standards and that teachers have been involved in developing this alignment. Some states—Indiana and Massachusetts, for example—have created comprehensive lists of suggested authors. Teachers and librarians there created these lists in grade spans so that each list covers a range of titles for struggling and advanced readers in grades K-2, 3-5, and so on. Whether they are organized grade by grade or in grade spans, the lists should represent a wide range of potential student interests, exhibit a variety of categories by genre (poetry, fiction, nonfiction, reference, and functional documents, for example) and suggest titles in as many content areas as there are standards. States can be more confident about the alignment and fairness of their standards, instructional materials and tests by being very specific about the quality and complexity of materials in their curricula.

The curriculum should also describe available resources at the district and state levels—such as public libraries, archives, museums and community groups—as well as on the Internet, to support standards-based instruction. We looked for lists of materials and resources that would help teachers understand the expectations inherent in the standards and would help them address the standards more broadly than a single lesson or unit. States did not meet our criterion for providing instructional resources if they merely linked their standards to a host of Web sites that might contain information on the concepts or topics included in the standards. Such an approach is too broad to be useful to teachers in understanding the complexity of material that students should be able to master for a particular standard at a particular educational level.

3. The state provides information on instructional strategies or techniques to help teach the standards.
Although the goal of standards-based systems is for all students to meet high academic expectations, we know that all students will not become proficient at the same rate. A teacher may want to assign texts on the same topic but at various reading levels for different students, for example, thereby allowing all students to participate in group discussions without frustrating either the struggling student or the student who needs a challenge. A curriculum should outline these kinds of scenarios and suggest materials and activities for every unit. In addition, a curriculum should include a variety of strategies to assist students who are not able to demonstrate evidence of progress.

We reviewed state materials on the Web to determine if they provided instructional strategies to help students meet the standards. Instructional strategies in illustrative lesson plans were not considered in making a judgment because we felt such materials, while useful and important, were too content-specific to ensure that the teacher could develop a repertoire of appropriate strategies.

4. The state provides performance indicators to clarify the quality of student work required for mastery of the content standards.
Academic content standards—the foundation of a standards-based system—describe what content knowledge and skills students must master. Performance indicators describe the level of student work that demonstrates mastery of the content standards and answers the question: "How much is good enough?" In addition, because they guard against widely varying interpretations of what constitutes adequate performance, they ensure that all students are held to the same expectations for achievement.

Everyone has a definition of "good," whether it pertains to food, music or student work. One school's "A" might be another school's "B." One teacher's "A" might be another teacher's "B." Just as vague standards can be interpreted in as many different ways as there are teachers, "a coherent paragraph" or an "adequately summarized science experiment" might mean different things to different teachers, so they need performance indicators to ensure that there is a common understanding of the quality of work necessary to meet the standards.

To be fair to teachers and students alike, it the state must illustrate what it means by "proficient" and other performance levels with analyses of why particular examples fit one level of performance and not another. The state should provide sufficient samples of student work to permit teachers to agree on "how good is good enough," as well as on "exemplary" or "not good enough" at either end, and to allow them to compare their students' work to the state quality indicators.

With performance indicators, teachers can identify the evidence of student work necessary to demonstrate mastery and can plan and implement appropriate instruction. Teachers can use performance indicators to determine if student work shows sufficient mastery of the content and, if not, to identify strengths that can be built upon and weaknesses that must be rectified. Teachers can provide specific feedback to students based on the performance criteria, and students can use those criteria to gauge their own progress toward mastery.

States may use a variety of tools to assist teachers in understanding the level or performance required for mastery. In reviewing state material, we look for:

Performance descriptors. These are clear, general statements of the criteria necessary to demonstrate achievement of the standards. For example a performance descriptor from Wyoming for an "advanced" 11th-grade writer states: "Advanced writers write with a clearly intended purpose and audience, successfully integrating voice and format. Their writing shows logical and sophisticated organization. Ideas are presented clearly and supported by specific and precise details. Sentence structure is varied and complex, and language is rich and engaging. Advanced writers demonstrate sophisticated control of conventions."

Rubrics or scoring guides. These are more specific indicators of the expectations for student work. They define the features of what work should look like at performance levels that meet, exceed, or fail to meet the standards.

Sample student work. Examples of student work at different grade levels are another way the state can show teachers and parents what work looks like at the various performance levels (e.g., meets, doesn't meet, exceeds) identified in the performance descriptors.

Commentary on student work. Commentary not only provides the samples of student work but it explains to teachers and parents why the work does or does not meet the expectations described in the rubric or scoring guide.

5. The state disseminates lesson plans and units based on the standards.
A state that is committed to standards-based reform understands that materials alone will not result in students reaching high standards. To help make the curriculum real, states should collect model lesson plans from teachers across the state, maintain an easily accessible "clearinghouse" of quality lesson plans and ensure that all teachers are aware of and have access to these resources.

In judging state lesson plans, we looked for evidence of a specification of the standards being addressed, a description of the prior knowledge needed, integration of two or more standards, a list of the materials/resources needed to complete the unit/lesson, the inclusion of classroom assessments/exercises, rubrics and student work, a specification of the time needed to complete the lesson and/or unit, general instructional guidance, and instructional strategies for diverse learners. It is important to stress that fully developed lesson plans exhibit all of the features described above.