The Trouble with the Standards Movement

Two years later, the Bush administration announced its national education goals, called America 2000, and began the process of offering grants to educational organizations that would establish voluntary educational standards in the various fields. What George Bush and the governors started, Bill Clinton carried on with the creation of Goals 2000: Educate America Act. The goals include the lofty mission of making the U.S. first in the world in mathematics, preparing all children for learning by the time they enter kindergarten, eliminating adult illiteracy, and making every school drug-free and safe. The new goals would also save the U.S. further embarrassment by helping us climb the global reading and math score rankings, break out of a tie with Iceland, and forge ahead of Hungary, South Korea, and Japan.

In conjunction with the goals, Congress appropriated funds to the U.S. Department of Education to put some teeth behind the standards and goals by developing voluntary national tests. But most governors of both parties resisted the idea of a concerted federal effort to create national tests for all states. Instead, they believed quality national performance would evolve as each state committed to its own approach to assessing student achievement. By the beginning of the current academic year more than forty states had enacted legislation for standards, thirty-three of them also including high stakes testing with grade twelve exit exams and benchmark tests at various other grades to determine progress.

While it’s hard to argue against standards (it’s mostly a question of whose standards and how they are implemented), the effort to improve education nationally with tough standards and state-generated assessment tests, ironically, is as much cause for alarm as for celebration. One problem with the standards movement is that the process has devolved into a matter of political bravura, as if politicians feel they are doing children a service by saying, “We’ll show you lazy kids who’s tough, who’s in charge.” In many places “high stakes” essentially translates into punishment for many students: fail the graduating tests and you don’t get a diploma. Even though the governors emphasized the fairness of high expectations for all children and the elimination of economic status and race as factors for success in school, students of color and children in poor families have been among the chief victims of the current assessment mania. In Florida thousands of poor students have been denied graduation solely because they cannot pass the exit exam. In Texas a federal judge is hearing a civil rights case challenging the state’s Assessment of Academic Skills. In Massachusetts students have staged boycotts because of the high failure rate of the Comprehensive Assessment System. Clearly, a backlash against the standards and assessment movement is growing.

Another problem, in many states, is that the tests and the standards upon which they are based have assumed a twisted life of their own. Just as school officials are determined to look good by myopically focusing on improving SAT scores — whose original intent was as an aptitude test, simply one predictor of academic success in the first year of college — some states are trying to look good with high scores in these new assessment tests, essentially appropriating the test scores for a dubious purpose. In Ohio, for instance, many middle schools report 100 percent of eighth graders pass the state’s Proficiency Tests by, admittedly, teaching to the tests. In some states, where the tests serve as exit exams, students who fail as eighth or ninth graders continue to take the tests each year until they pass.

Other states are emphasizing their incredibly high standards by administering tests that the large majority of students find impossible to pass. In Virginia more than 90 percent of the students failed in the first two years of the new exams, and rarely can a teacher be found who sees any correlation between the curriculum and the state tests. Where once a test was a measure of what the teacher taught and the student learned, some assessments based on new standards seem to be created to drive someone’s idea of curriculum redesign and teacher education reform. Often in media accounts of progress in standards and assessment, the words “children,” “students,” “curriculum,” or “learning” are nowhere to be found. Testing is not about teaching and learning; it is about testing.

Proponents of the standards movement often portray critics as being opposed to high standards and high expectations for all students; but in reality leading educators and reformers are dedicated to quality and, while believing in much that the standards purport to accomplish, are also concerned about what is being lost.

In his new book, The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy, Nicholas Lemann writes, “The obsession with testing measures chiefly one virtue — the ability to take standardized tests, not wisdom or originality or humor or toughness or empathy or common sense or independence or determination — let alone moral worth.” The current fixation with tests, Lemann continues, “…may only make things worse, creating new industries to help coach teachers and students to pass the next rounds of the big test.”

Well known by independent school leaders for his book, The Human Side of School Change, Robert Evans says, “The whole standards and testing enterprise…targets the wrong goals in the wrong ways, aiming at the recall of facts, figures, and formulas instead of the ability to apply knowledge in real-life settings.”

Vito Perrone, director of teacher education programs at Harvard University, recently observed in a lecture at The Bank Street College of Education that those who speak most confidently about reform through testing, “who seem to know best about children’s development and needs…stand far away from classrooms, children, and young people. The movement is more about standardization than standards, and a great danger is that given all the state mandates, the richness of classroom dynamics, what is studied and talked about, will be narrowed and stunted.”

The dispute comes home to independent schools in states like California and Indiana where the challenge to preserving the autonomy of independent schools is severe, with issues of institutional accreditation and teacher certification tied into state required testing in all schools. In New York the intrusion into independent school standards and governance includes a legislative effort to require a Regents diploma for all students. Frederick Calder, executive director of the New York State Association of Independent Schools, is taking on the state regarding both the diploma issue and testing. In a speech this fall to the New York City Guild of Independent Schools, Calder said, “Standardized testing in independent schools has an important but very small function in the educational process. And that is to take an occasional measurement for purposes of comparability or diagnosis. Most of us believe that that is the extent of such tests’ usefulness. If, on the other hand, standardized testing that is primarily content based becomes dominant or overarching in a school, it destroys curricular autonomy, negates the whole point of the Socratic method, and smothers original thought, all antithetical to everything independent education stands for.”

Where does all this put independent schools?

First, we should acknowledge that the standards movement, in some form, is here to stay. We cannot conveniently ignore state mandates on all schools, private as well as public, because there is the real possibility of the loss of accreditation and decertification of teachers in independent schools. When state legislators and department of education officials discuss standards, we need to be at the table. Once new state education laws are in place and tests are inevitable, we have to be involved in the development of the tests. At the same time, we should continue to drive home the point that such tests are only one measure of what students learn in school. In the 1980s, independent school teachers contributed to the significant work of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the National Art Education Association, and even greater involvement is needed now, in partnership with public school educators, to design rational standards and fair assessments. If we remain on the sideline, some downright absurd requirements can be foisted on children and teachers, such as the several states that typically have declared, “fourth graders will be able to analyze social, economic, and political development in Incan, Mayan, and Aztec civilizations and ancient China and India and make comparisons with nineteenth century United States.”

We need to inform the school community — trustees, parents, and alumni/ae, in addition to teachers and students — about the standards movement in each state and the implications for independent schools, and we have to be ready to decide on which issues we will speak together, with one voice, in the best interests of independent education. Selective political activism and coalition building for our schools and for the common good are essential.

Legislators and business leaders are right that America’s future lies in the quality of the nation’s schools. But when the effort to meet state standards trivializes learning and dictates what children will learn, when the very integrity and independence of our schools are assailed, we must speak out and be involved. And if your school values the “deeper, richer, more engaging curriculum in which students play an active role in integrating ideas and pursuing controversial questions” that writer Alfie Kohn believes in, while the state demands that all students in all schools memorize irrelevant, disjointed facts and be drilled endlessly to look good on standardized tests, we just might be in one of the biggest fights ever for our survival.

Peter D. Relic is president of NAIS.

National Association of Independent Schools