The educational technologies of the past quarter century--from teaching machines to minimal competency testing--all share the general purpose of helping educators make better, or more uniform, decisions. The currently favored technique for shaping local decisions is criterion-referenced testing. Some criterion-referenced testers first find out how well students can read or write or play musical instruments and tell the decision maker how well students should read, etc. The concept of performance standards has general appeal. The purpose of this paper is to consider how performance standards might help decision makers meet their needs. The author argues that no practical performance standards technology exists yet (despite the growing amount of legislation that depends on such a technology), and, furthermore, that the potential for such a technology is extremely limited. The author concludes that educational technicians have an obligation to search for other methods to meet the needs that performance standards proposed to meet.