What should students and their teachers know and be able to do? For the last 20 years that question has anchored the debate about public education in the United States, and it continues to frame educational policy at both the state and federal level. Since the appearance of A Nation at Risk, the 1983 report proclaiming that “the educational foundations of our society are…being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity,” American schooling has been subject to any number of efforts to redesign its curriculum, its methods of assessment, and its teaching force.

At the center of those efforts has been a federal government willing to take an unprecedented and increasingly visible role in orchestrating, funding, and measuring educational change. Though the federal interest in K-12 schooling extends back at least to the National Education Defense legislation born of Sputnik in 1957, and though national policy and financing have had some impact in such areas as school desegregation, special education, and the support of under-funded schools, seldom in our history has the U.S. government played such a powerful role in shaping life in classrooms as it does at this moment.

The driving force behind almost all recent school reform efforts has been a two-stage initiative: in the first stage, stakeholders develop standards that specify what students and teachers “should know and be able to do” and, in the second, assessments are designed that measure whether those standards are being met. Both tasks have proven to be logistically complicated and politically challenging. After several controversial efforts to design standards for students at the national level, the project has been largely transferred to the individual states.

Meanwhile, high-stakes tests that measure student progress in meeting standards have brought with them a host of unintended consequences. In Texas, for instance—one of the first states to adopt state standards and high stakes testing—studies have shown an increased drop-out rate for minority students and a decline in many measures of student learning—even when scores on the state test have gone up.

Standards-based reform for teachers and teacher education, however, has had a more successful history, and this is where The University of Iowa’s College of Education is playing a significant role. Like most other states, Iowa has adopted a common set of standards for students preparing to become teachers. The standards specify that future teachers must show competence in planning instruction, for example, in understanding the principles of student learning, in orchestrating diversity, and in collaborating with colleagues, among other skills. But Iowa, again like many other states, has further mandated that future teachers demonstrate their strengths in these areas not only through the completion of course work, but also through a portfolio of performances and artifacts that show directly that they have mastered the standards.

To manage such an enormous project, the College of Education’s Office of Teacher Education has teamed with John Achrazoglou, director of educational technology and Rebecca Anthony, director of educational placement, to develop the electronic portfolio, or ePortfolio?—a web-based program where students store their professional work for reflection, revision, and evaluation. In every teacher education course that our students take, they are asked to upload specific examples of their work to their web site. This work is organized by standard and by course, so that reviewers can evaluate student performances within a course.

For example, students may save work on the Methods of Teaching Reading course page and also on the Planning for Instruction standard page, where artifacts would come from several courses.

We have invested thousands of staff hours in this project, and in the fall of 2003 it will be ready for full implementation. It is widely cited across the state and across much of the country as one of the freshest and most intelligent efforts to manage the new performance mandate.

But the College of Education is going further still. We have recently teamed with Cedar Rapids Schools to develop an ePortfolio??for first- and second-year teachers who, like teacher education students, must demonstrate their mastery of standards through a collection of performances and artifacts. The Cedar Rapids project represents an important extension of ideas developed over several years in the College of Education, and its resources will soon be available to every school district in Iowa. This is one of the many ways that our college serves the state while, at the same time, creating the tools that our students will need to teach in the 21st century.