Higher standards: two words you'll hear wherever people are buzzing about the woes of the public school system.

Higher standards? It always struck me as a weird way to improve the schools. Look. Suppose you're coaching a pole-vaulting team, and your vaulters can't clear a six-foot bar. Do you raise the bar to seven feet?

"I must be missing something," I thought. I decided to take a closer look at this whole "standards-based" reform movement. I charged in like Don Quixote with a bucket for a helmet and a broomstick for a sword, fully intending to sweep aside educratic claptrap and cut right to the data. I would compare a few schools that have adopted the reforms with a few that haven't, and I'd see what the numbers show: Is it working or not?

Let me tell you up front: I was naive. The standards movement is like an impressionist painting. You can tell what it is from a distance, but up close it dissolves into brushstrokes and squiggles.

What exactly do we mean by "standards" in the context of school reform?

Here's the best definition I can muster: Standards are documents that list what kids should know and be able to do at different grade levels.

Fine. What documents? Who wrote them? Where are they? How many?

As it turns out there are more of these documents than you can count on your fingers and toes. Every state except Iowa has its own set. Various associations representing subjects like math or science also publish "national standards." Independent research groups such as the Mid-continent Regional Education Laboratory have their versions. And most, if not all, school districts have their own. So do many individual schools.

When you think about it, standards aren't new. Was there ever a teacher who didn't have some idea about what students should learn? What student hasn't taken tests? And what is a test but a bar you clear to show that you've learned something--that is, that you've met a standard.

Where did this movement come from, you ask?