Work on “customizing” the performance standards for use in New York City’s public schools began in March 1997 and continued through to the end of the summer.

The work samples and commentaries form an essential element of the performance standards because they give concrete meaning to the words in the performance descriptions and show the level of performance expected by the standards. The principal goal of the customization process was to replace and supplement the collection of student work samples used to illustrate standard-setting performances in the New Standards™ Performance Standards with work produced by students in New York City’s public schools. To achieve this goal, all districts and high school superintendencies nominated representatives to join a “customization” working group to collect work samples and meet regularly throughout the process to select the work to be included in this New York City edition.

Deciding what constitutes a standard-setting performance.
The work samples published in this volume were selected from a much wider range of samples, numbering thousands of pieces of work.

The benchmarks against which these work samples were judged are the work samples that were selected for publication in the New Standards™ Performance Standards to illustrate standard setting-performances in relation to various parts of the standards. Those work samples were selected through a variety of strategies designed to tap the judgment of teachers and subject experts around the country about the “level of performance” at which the standards should be set at each of the grade levels: elementary, middle, and high.

We define the elementary school level as being the expectations for student performance at approximately the end of fourth grade; middle school level as the expectations at approximately the end of eighth grade; and high school level as the expectations at approximately the end of tenth grade. We used the concept grade level as our reference point because it is in common use and most people understand it. However, “at approximately the end of fourth grade,” for example, begs some questions. Do we mean the level at which our fourth graders currently perform? Or, do we mean the level at which our fourth graders might perform if expectations for their performance were higher and the programs through which they learn were designed to help them meet those higher expectations? And, do we mean the level at which the highest-achieving fourth graders perform or the level at which most fourth graders should perform?

We set the expectations for level of performance in terms of what we should expect of students who work hard in a good program; that is, our expectations assume that students will have tried hard to achieve the standards and they will have studied in a program designed to help them to do so. These performance standards are founded on a firm belief that the great majority of students can achieve them, providing they work hard, they study a curriculum designed to help them achieve the standards that is taught by teachers who are prepared to teach it well, and they have access to the resources they need to succeed. These conditions form an essential part of the New Standards Social Compact which underpins our belief that all students can and should be expected to meet high standards.

Some of the work samples included in the New Standards™ Performance Standards were also included in the Consultation Draft; some appeared in earlier drafts as well. The appropriateness of these work samples as illustrating standard-setting performances was the subject of extensive review, through discussions among the New Standards advisory committee for English Language Arts and through round-table discussions among experienced teachers and experts in English Language Arts. Some of the work samples included in earlier drafts did not pass the scrutiny of these reviews and were not included in the eventual publication. Many additional work samples were identified in the process of consultation and then subjected to the iterative process of review that was used to establish the level at which the standards should be set and the selection of work samples to be used to illustrate the meaning of the standards.

Inevitably, agreement about level of performance was easiest to achieve for those parts of the standards that relate to familiar kinds of expectations for student work. The parts of the Writing standard that refer to familiar and often-practiced kinds of writing, such as narrative account, are good examples of this. Not only did we have access to a wide range of samples from which to choose, but teachers and experts in the field have a long tradition of discussion and assessment of the features of writing that exemplify the essential characteristics of a narrative account. In other cases, where experience was less developed and there were fewer samples of student work available for review, it was necessary to build agreement about the features that should be evident in work produced at the different benchmark grade levels. The narrative procedure part of the Writing standard and the Public Documents and Functional Documents standards are examples of this.

Selecting the work samples included in this New York City edition.
The customization group for the New York City edition of the performance standards followed a similar iterative process of review of collections of work samples to arrive at the selection that is included in this volume. Our goal was to identify ten candidate work samples for each part of the performance standards, to provide the basis for selecting samples that would reflect the diversity of the communities that make up New York City, to demonstrate different approaches to producing standard-setting work (for example, more formal kinds of reports of information as well as reports that adopt a journalistic style), and to provide examples of work produced in subjects from across the curriculum—not only in classes called English or Language Arts.

Districts supported the process by encouraging schools to provide samples of student work for review through their representatives on the group. We organized ourselves according to our expertise and experience at each of the grade spans and divided responsibility across the various parts of the standards. In this way, sub-groups developed expertise in relation to specific parts of the standards through extensive practice in reviewing work samples with reference to the relevant performance descriptions and to the work samples and commentaries published in the New Standards™ Performance Standards.

When the customization working group met, initially once each month and then more frequently, we monitored our progress towards achieving the goal of ten candidate work samples for each part of the standards and discussed the characteristics of the work samples reviewed to date. In some cases work that was judged as nearly meeting the expectations for standard-setting work was returned to the students who had produced it with an invitation for revision and suggestions about the aspects of the work that would benefit from revision. Many students responded to that invitation and returned revised work for further review.

At each stage of the process, review of the work collected to date helped sharpen our focus on the characteristics we needed to look for in the work we collected. Among the by-products of this process was our growing appreciation of the significance of the tasks or assignments that generate student work in influencing the quality of the product. Put simply, the work students produce generally reflects the assignment they have been given and the instruction on which the assignment is based. Well-crafted student work reflects instruction that focuses students’ attention explicitly on the central purposes of the kinds of reading and writing they need to do and the characteristics they need to develop in the work they produce. We are resolved to make this direct connection between standards and instruction the focus of our continuing efforts to assist all students to meet the expectations illustrated in the work samples in this volume.

Throughout the process, we had to remind ourselves continually that work that illustrates standard-setting performances is not the same as “best” work or “most exceptional” work. Many of the work samples we reviewed exceeded the expectations of the standards. Those work samples do not appear in this collection. We also had to remind ourselves that we were not trying to put together an anthology to celebrate the work students produce, valuable as such anthologies can be. Rather, our purpose was to identify samples of work that would help to give concrete meaning to the qualities described in the performance descriptions and establish the level of performance we should expect of work that is “good enough” to meet the standards. This meant that we chose some work samples over others because they provided clearer exemplification of the “bullet points” in the performance descriptions, even though some of the work we passed over was engaging and unquestionably counted as “good” work.

We also learned that practice in making judgments about work in relation to the standards pays off. As the number of pieces of student work we had read and reviewed closely grew larger, we became clearer about the meaning of the bullet points in the performance descriptions and more confident of our judgment about the features that need to be demonstrated in work if it is to be considered standard setting. Some pieces of work that we judged to be candidates for inclusion in the collection early in the process did not rate among our judgments later on. Equally, there were some pieces of work that we rejected early in the process and brought back for further consideration later on.

In the end, we surpassed our goal of identifying ten candidate pieces of student work to illustrate some parts of the standards and struggled to meet the goal for other parts of the standards. This is not surprising since the standards encompass a more comprehensive range of expectations for performance in language arts than has typically been part of school curriculums.

Work produced by a diverse range of students.
The work samples in this book reflect the diversity of backgrounds and experiences of the students studying in New York City’s public schools and the communities of which they are a part. The student work illustrating standard-setting performances in English Language Arts comes from schools throughout the city. There is also work from District 75. The work comes from students with a wide range of cultural backgrounds, some of whom have a first language other than English but who have acquired the proficiency in English they need to produce work that illustrates standard-setting performances in the English Language Arts. There is also work produced by students studying in ESL programs and students studying in bilingual education programs.

In some cases, the diverse backgrounds and experiences of the students are evident in the work samples, through the experiences that the students chose to share through their writing. In other cases, the students’ writing reveals little about who they are. While we worked to ensure that the collection reflected the diversity of our students, we have not made specific reference to these characteristics in the commentaries that accompany the work samples—not even where the work was produced by students studying in special education settings. Work that illustrates a standard-setting performance is standard setting no matter who produced it. What unites the work samples is that they all help to illustrate the performance standards by demonstrating standard-setting performances for parts of one or more of the standards and demonstrate that all students can produce work that meets high expectations.

The comprehensiveness of the work samples.
This volume contains nearly eighty samples of student work. We sought to include work samples that illustrate standard-setting performances for as many of the parts of the standards as possible. The great majority of the work samples were selected from work produced by New York City students. However, we also selected some of the work samples from the collection previously published in the New Standards™ Performance Standards.

This collection is restricted to work samples that illustrate standard-setting performances at the benchmark grade levels. However, during the process of collecting and reviewing the work we set aside many further work samples for publication. These include work samples that illustrate performances that exceed the expectations for the standards, work samples that illustrate progress toward meeting the standards, and work samples that illustrate common characteristics of work that does not meet standards but, nevertheless, help to highlight instructional directions that might be taken to help students progress towards the standards. We also set aside some of the work samples that were not selected for inclusion but were instructive for us in the process of arriving at judgments about which work to include in this collection—instructive because they yielded the liveliest discussions about what constitutes standard-setting work. These work samples will be made available to schools to assist in the process of translating the standards into instruction that will help all students work towards meeting high expectations.

Genuine student work.
In all cases, the work samples are genuine student work. While they illustrate standard-setting performances for parts of the standards, many samples are not “perfect” in every respect. Some, for example, include spelling errors or clumsy grammatical constructions. We think it is important that the standards are illustrated by means of authentic work samples and accordingly have made no attempt to “doctor” the work in order to correct these imperfections: the work has been included “warts and all.” Where errors occur, we have included a note drawing attention to the nature of the mistakes and commenting on their significance in the context of the work. In some cases, for example, the work was produced as a first draft only (in which case it would be expected that the errors would be corrected in work presented as finished work), or there is evidence in the rest of the work to suggest that an error was a slip rather than evidence of misunderstanding.

In other words, we tried to adopt reasonable expectations for correctness but not to overlook errors where they arose. We also resolved to apply those expectations consistently to all the work samples. We reviewed all work samples for accuracy in relation to subject content as well as paying attention to spelling, punctuation, and grammar.