Standards are an evolution of the earlier OBE (outcomes-based education)[4] which was largely rejected in the United States as unworkable in the 1990s, and is still being implemented by some and abandoned by other governments.
[8] This credential has since been abandoned by every state which first adopted the concept, including Washington and Oregon and largely replaced by graduation examinations.
His organization had contracts with states and districts covering as many as half of all American school children by their own claims, and many states enacted education reform legislation in the early 1990s based on this model, which was also known at the time as "performance-based education" as OBE (and the non-OBE progressive reforms co-marketed with it) had been too widely attacked to be saleable under that name.
The vision of the standards-based education reform movement[9] is that all teenagers will receive a meaningful high school diploma that serves essentially as a public guarantee that they can read, write, and do basic mathematics (typically through first-year algebra) at a level which might be useful to an employer.
To avoid a surprising failure at the end of high school, standards trickle down through all the lower grades, with regular assessments through a variety of means.
A reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) was passed to ensure that all states had rigorous standards for all subject areas and grade levels.
The movement resulted in the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001, which required that states make yearly progress towards having all students be proficient by 2014, as evidenced by annual standardized testing.
In December 2015, President Obama signed the Every Student Succeeds Act into law devolving many of NCLB's testing requirements to the states.
Some education researchers, such as UCLA's Gary Orfield, disagreed that all students should pass a rigorous test just to get a high school diploma.