The idea that a good education requires that every student receive a rigorous academic core experience is not a new one. A report prepared by the illustrious group of scholars, the Committee of Ten, published in 1894, forcefully called for an established academic curriculum for all high school students, whether or not they were going to college. In many ways this report could have been written today. For example, the report said "As studies in language and in the natural sciences are best adapted to cultivate the habits of observation; as mathematics is the traditional training of the reasoning faculties; so history and its allied branches are better adapted than any other studies to promote the invaluable mental power which we call judgment." In 1918, a group formed by the National Education Association and dominated by a new breed of "progressive educationists" completely repudiated the work of the Committee of Ten. The "Cardinal Principles" issued by this Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education set the stage for most of the educational fads and innovations of American education in the 20th century. The report said that the topics dealt with in schools should depend "chiefly upon the degree to which such topics can be related to the present life interests of the pupil." We have now had 80 years of reforms, which have featured such innovations as the dismantling of the traditional curriculum while at the same time labeling a curriculum based upon core standards as 'elite,' the child-centered classroom, whole-child education, affective learning, and outcome-based education. Arguments against standards and a readily understood core curriculum can still be heard today. "Standards will oppress minorities and the poor"--as if not having them doesn't leave educationists free to offer unequal schooling and tax cutters free to slash school spending. "Standards will stifle innovation"--as though all innovation is beneficent and clear standards are not the best friends of sincere innovators.
We continue to see a tension between those who advocate academic core subjects and readily understood academic standards and those who promote various pet projects dealing with sweeping changes in teaching style, formats used to test students, or schools' mission. "[To] succeed where national efforts [at education reform] failed," says Paul Gagnon, "state and local school leaders, teachers, parents, and citizens need to understand what they are up against, what has to be done differently, and how much is at stake. They can begin by recognizing, and tolerating no longer, the vast inertia of an educational establishment entrenched in many university faculties of education; in well-heeled interest associations, with their bureaucracies, journals, and conventions; in hundreds of research centers and consulting firms; in federal, state, and local bureaucracies; in textbook-publishing houses and aggressive new industries of educational technology and assessment. On the whole this establishment is well-meaning, and it is not monolithic, all of one mind. But its mainstream, trained and engrossed in the means rather than the academic content of education, instinctively resists any reform that starts with content and then lets it shape everything else--certainly the means" (from "What Should Children Learn?" The Atlantic Monthly, December, 1995). Calls for improved standards intensified in the 1960s in reaction to scientific advances of the U.S.S.R.. Parents revolted against the prevailing educational fad of that time, "affective education," which thought creating feeling citizens was more important than producing knowledgeable, skilled ones. Then in 1983, A Nation at Risk was published, which decried a "rising tide of mediocrity "in America's schools." The report noted the poor performance of students on the SAT and similar tests and the degradation of requirements in core academic subjects in American secondary schools. The two main responses to A Nation at Risk were increased use of standardized assessments at state and local levels and increased course requirements for graduation from high school. In 1980, 29 states had state-mandated testing programs, compared to 46 states in 1990 (Congressional Office of Technology Assessment report, 1992). In the early 1980s only 13.4% of high school graduates had completed 4 years of English as well as 3 years of mathematics, science, and social studies. By 1990, 39.8% of high school graduates had taken the recommended years of these core subjects.
At the same time these responses were occurring another one was beginning which ultimately became quite controversial. It started innocently enough. Business leaders and politicians were tiring of seeing more and more money invested in K-12 education without seeing improvement in the quality of graduates. They reasoned that if total quality management principles worked in business, they ought to work in education. If one set up standards, one could then prod the educational system into producing student achievement that would strive to match the standards. Unfortunately, when this approach was filtered through the educational establishment, the business executives and politicians ended up getting the outcome-based education (OBE) movement. Instead of easily understood, concrete standards, the OBE movement produced vague, abstract outcomes, many of which had the flavor of mandates for modifying student behavior and value systems. The type of school envisioned in the writings of OBE enthusiasts was very much like a reenactment of the progressive school of the 1930s, where students would seek to discover knowledge through individual and group projects "facilitated" by the teacher. The assessment industry, which had been growing rapidly through the 1980s, and the OBE movement interacted synergistically. OBE proponents were saying that traditional standardized testing was inadequate to capture the "higher order skills" students were going to acquire in reaching the outcomes. Performance assessments had to be the dominant assessment system for the classroom and for high-stakes testing of students. Educationists in various education school research centers began to tap state legislatures for sizable appropriations to fund development of state-wide high-stakes performance assessments.
At the federal level, the thrust for quality educational standards was transformed by Goals 2000 into a blue print for a huge bureaucracy, which was to concern itself with setting content and skills standards, performance standards, opportunity-to-learn standards, alternative assessments, approval of state plans dealing with all of these, and developing certification mechanisms for every conceivable part of the educational process (from classroom teaching procedures through certifications of mastery for students and a national data base containing information on individual students). Funding from the federal government and encouraged by the federal government's Goals 2000 policies began to pour into independent and university-affiliated organizations for the creation of goals, outcomes, and alternative assessments, particularly performance assessments. There have been rather potent negative reactions to the standards which have been produced for history, mathematics, and English at the national level. Many have felt that Goals 2000 was a method to institutionalize OBE and to provide power and funding to various educational special interests, the most important one being a burgeoning assessment industry. There has now been a move to devolve Goals 2000 activity back to the states with the hope that local control will lead to closer scrutiny of educational reform proposals.
OBE has been very destructive to the standards movement. The attitude of the educationists promoting OBE was that they knew best and parents just needed to be informed about the benefits of OBE so they could "take ownership" of OBE style programs. When public anger about the implementation of OBE style programs swelled, educationists began denying that even the most blatant OBE programs were in fact OBE. OBE has left a legacy of mistrust in the public about what policy makers say about outcomes, goals, or standards and about the motivations educationists have when proposing assessment innovations. Best selling books such as Dumbing Down Our Kids, by Charles Sykes attacked OBE as yet another example of the educational establishment--termed "the blob" by Sykes--spinning out of control. Revelations about destructive classroom practices in reading and mathematics being mandated in California under the auspices of a "state framework" of supposed standards and outcomes raised questions about the competency of educationists to police themselves in evaluating evidence for educational practices.
Nevertheless, a national consensus seems to be emerging, that perhaps the states and various organizations will yet be able to come up with useful standards that can stimulate more consistent and better academic achievement by America's students. The Core Knowledge Foundation, spear-headed by E.D. Hirsch Jr., a Professor of English at the University of Virginia, has quietly been going about the development of what amount to excellent content standards and supporting materials to help schools implement them. Consider works such as What Your Kindergartner Needs to Know, What Your First Grader Needs to Know, etc. Curricular frameworks from Core Knowledge are now being used by a number of charter schools across the country. These schools were in many cases an "in your face" reaction of parents and communities to the OBE approach.
Paul Gagnon, in his lead article in The Atlantic Monthly (December, 1995) said he hoped that states may yet succeed in creating useful standards and advanced opinions about how states should proceed:
Having fifty sets of standards need not mean disaster. But the Committee of Ten was right: something close to national agreement on a vital common core is indispensable to educational equity, to dislodge and replace the empty, undemanding programs that leave so many children untaught and disadvantaged. Without some such agreement, the much heralded devolution of reform leadership to the states could make things worse.
The four steps essential to content-based school reform are no mystery. But conventional educators will object to them, for they focus on subject matter and must be carried out by subject-matter teachers and scholars, not by curriculum specialists unlearned in academic disciplines. In step one, teachers and scholars work together under public review to write the content standards--brief, scrupulously selected lists of what is most worth knowing in each academic subject. These have but one function: to lay before students, parents, teachers, and the university teachers of teachers the essential core of learning that all students in a modern democracy have the right not to be allowed to avoid. "Core" means what it says: teaching it should take no more than two thirds of the time given to each subject, the rest being left to local school and teacher choice.
This step is the most critical but most often misunderstood. What is a subject-matter essential, or "standard," and what is not? It is specific, not abstract, but it does not descend to detail. In history a typical standard asks students to understand the causes of the First World War, with an eye to the technological, economic, social, and political forces at work, together with the roles of individuals, of accident, and ordinary confusion. It does not ask students to "master the concept of conflict in world history." Nor does it ask them to memorize the names of the twenty central characters in the tragedy of the summer of 1914.
As they select each standard, scholars and teachers must consider whether they can explain its importance when students ask "So what?' The First World War is an easy example. What it did to Americans was to shape their lives and deaths for the rest of the twentieth century--from the Depression and the Second World War to the end of the Cold War, from our hubris of 1945 to our present fantasy that we have spent ourselves too poor even to keep our parks clean or our libraries open. If a standard cannot be explained to the young, or to an educated public, it is either too general or too detailed. In a hurry, some states have issued "common cores of learning" that are lists of healthy attitudes and abstract "learning outcomes." Others have copied detail directly out of overstuffed national standards documents. Neither is a help to teachers or curriculum makers.
Step two was never "national" business: writing a state curriculum framework, saying in which grades the essentials should be taught. Its function is to end the plague of gaps and repetitions that only American educators seem resigned to accept as normal. Articulating subject matter across the elementary and secondary years also requires a collaboration of equals--teachers, scholars, and learning specialists--each of whom has things to say that the others need to hear. The word "framework," too, means what is says; it leaves the third step--course design and pedagogy--to the school and the teacher. They must have the authority to make the choices most important to them and to their students: the topics and questions by which to teach the essentials, the day-to-day content of instruction, the materials and methods best suited to their students and to their own strengths.
Step four, writing performance standards and tests of achievement, can sensibly follow only when the others have been taken. But some states are hurrying to award expensive contracts to outside testing firms before anyone has thought about, much less decided, what is worth testing. To leave this to experts and let the rush to "accountability"--which now has a potent assessment lobby behind it--drive standards and course content will kill all chances for school improvement.
The leadership of the American Federation of Teachers decried the fuzzy outcomes being developed at the state and school district level. The AFT published Setting Strong Standards in 1994, which gave advice about how to write clear standards. They amplified on 10 criteria:
In 1995 and 1996 the AFT issued reports entitled Making Standards Matter. These reports, which the AFT may very well continue to publish annually, describe the progress of states in developing standards. We agree with the overall approach described in the AFT 1996 report to judge the quality of state standards which had been produced by late 1995. The AFT looked at whether a state was developing standards in four core areas--math, science, English, and social studies; whether the standards were clear and specific enough to provide the basis for a core curriculum; whether the standards included the subject's body of content; and how closely the standards were benchmarked. The more grade level benchmarks included, the better a state fared in AFT's judgment. We agree completely that grade-by-grade standards are essential if parents and teachers are really to be able to use them effectively in the classroom. Of the state standards analyzed, Virginia's received top honors for its standards in all four disciplines. We think that Wisconsin should closely examine the process used by Virginia in developing these exemplary standards and the Virginia standards themselves in setting about the development of standards for Wisconsin's schools. The Standards of Learning for Virginia Public Schools can be accessed on the Internet.
Hopefully this handout has given you background information that will help you understand the controversies surrounding the standards movement in Wisconsin and the United States.
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