. This was followed in 1989 by the Governors' Conference, which developed "Goals 2000", emphasizing "world class standards in the basic subjects (English, math, geography, history, science)" (Cunningham, 1999, p. 2). Two years later the federal government implemented a plan to support "privately funded efforts to develop standards for some subjects...art, civics, geography, history," which resulted in a "controversial response by various groups," in part, because:
1. The plan accepted the idea that academic content can be
different but equal, which amounted to tracking;
The educational establishment did not understand the purpose
of the "privately funded efforts to develop standards";
3. At 1,000 pages, the report was too long and encyclopedic
At roughly the same time, 1992, the National Council on Education Standards and Testing repeated its call for national standards, asserting that such standards "would help to provide an increasingly diverse mobile population with shared values and
...