In keeping with its contradictory goals, the DPI 's draft contains a lot of what can fairly be called double talk. At the heart of this double talk are the terms "content standard" and "performance standard." These terms were imposed on the DPI by the Governor's Executive Order #302 creating the Council on Model Academic Standards. There a "content standard" refers to what students should know and a "performance standard" to what they should be able to do. Presumably, students would meet standards either by answering questions (content) or accomplishing tasks (performance).
In the DPI 's drafts, the meanings of content and performance standards have undergone an amazing transformation. The DPI 's definitions can be found, for example, in an appendix to the second draft of its standards. There "content standards" are described as referring to "what students should know and be able to do," (emphasis added) whereas performance standards "tell how students will show that they are meeting the standard." These two types of standard are to be supplemented in the future by a third type, i.e., "proficiency standards," which state "how well students must perform."
These obscure and redundant definitions are designed to conceal the fact that the DPI 's "content standards" and "performance standards" are simply not standards at all in the normal sense of the word. To the man in the street, being able to run a mile in eight minutes might be a standard for employment by a police department. According to the DPI, however, that would be one of those "proficiency standards" which will be formulated some day in the future. What the DPI has given us for the time being are "content standards," e.g., policemen shall be mobile, and "performance standards," e.g., policemen shal1 demonstrate their mobility by running an appropriate distance at an appropriate speed. Obviously, such "standards" do not threaten local autonomy because their meanings depend entirely on the interpretation of imprecise terms like "appropriate."
The levels of difficulty hinted at by the DPI's "performance standards" range from very low to implausibly high. On the easy side, 4th grade students are expected to "maintain appropriate eye contact." At the other extreme, 12th grade students will supposedly "write creative fiction that includes an authentic setting, discernible tone, coherent plot, distinct characters, effective detail, believable dialogue and conflict resolution." Interpreted harshly these standards would pose a real challenge for Steven King, but obviously what they actually mean all depends on how they are interpreted: one teacher's "coherent plot, distinct characters, effective detail etc," would be another's illiterate gibberish. The essence of a real standard is that it provides a way to adjudicate between different subjective evaluations and that is precisely what the DPI draft lacks.
Another problem with the draft is that it has far too many "standards" for them to be taken seriously. In the Language Arts alone, 12th graders will supposedly demonstrate their competence in 98 different types of performance. This means that a twelfth-grade English teacher with just one class of twenty students would have to make nearly two thousand assessments to decide whether his students were living up to Wisconsin's standards.
I have taught courses in Greek and Latin and in ancient literature for twenty-four years at UW-Milwaukee and have come to view with alarm the poor preparation of Wisconsin's students in the Language Arts. From my perspective, Language Arts education in Wisconsin could be transformed if Wisconsin students were trained to meet just a few reasonable standards. In the area of grammar, for example, by the time students graduate from high school they should be able to identify the eight parts of speech in normal English prose and to diagram sentences. In vocabulary and spelling, they should be required to have mastered a list of say 500 fairly difficult vocabulary items, i.e., be able to spell, define, and use them correctly. In reading, they should have read (say) a half a dozen specified classics with comprehension. English teachers should, of course, do many other things in their classes besides assuring that their students achieve such minimal standards -- especially fostering the growth of their writing ability. A few modest standards such as I suggest, however, would do what standards are supposed to do, establish a ground floor, a minimally acceptable set of accomplishments. In fact, the ground floor defined by the standards that I propose would be on a considerably higher level than is currently occupied by many recent graduates of Wisconsin's public high schools.
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