 It is believed to be the educational equivalent of a planned economy which attempts to require all children to perform at world-class levels merely by raising expectations and imposing punishments and sanctions on schools and children who fall short of the new standards.The vision of the standards-based education reform movement 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.