Health educators are providing students with the health knowledge and health skills that are prerequisites for becoming health literate and using assessment tools to demonstrate effectiveness. In the school health educators' world, accountability equates to improved student knowledge and skills. To expect them to be held accountable for students' behavior would be professional suicide. In this paper, the authors intend to show how and why educators have adopted a standards-based philosophy of health education and how this philosophy provides the foundation for achieving public health goals. They also demonstrate similarities and differences in the integrated/ecological/behavior philosophy promoted by Governali and colleagues and the standards-based model adopted by many school health educators. Finally, they propose that the field of health education acknowledge the differences that exist between public health and education goals and develop new strategies for meeting today's requirements for school health education programs. (Contains 3 figures.)