Deborah Meier
I'm for "standards" if we are talking about a flag held high to see where we are going. But as a euphemism for a K–12 curriculum, standards are a bad idea. Setting fixed standards for what students should learn means aiming either too low or too high—never on target for each individual learner.
Before we decide which methods work in moving learners forward, we have to at least discuss "to what ends?" Effective standards—of any kind—uphold both our purposes and our good taste. People quite reasonably disagree on purposes. Some people may be willing to sacrifice a lot for Purpose A but very little for Purpose B. A group may agree on 10 goals for a good writing course, for instance, but disagree if forced to cut back to five. And good taste? Many books eventually declared classics were at first turned down by publishers and slammed by critics.
Every time we try to fix goals for public schooling, we end up in the same fix as the Constitutional originalists (who assume the U.S. Constitution has one immutable meaning); we sacrifice flexibility for immutability.
It's a fact that we don't know how to teach math well to everyone. Maybe we never will. It might be fruitful to question the assumption that "everyone" must know advanced algebra (as opposed to, say, advanced musicianship). We should also ask what it will cost those who never "get" algebra—or some other core subject—if the trend continues to make mastering algebra a roadblock to further study. Why don't we remove the roadblock instead?
The one demand I'd like to make of U.S. schools is that they give young people the tools to lead a powerful public life: to be knowledgeable and thoughtful about democracy and the U.S. Constitution. After that, let's provide choices where we can without polarizing the democracy we are trying to nourish.
William H. Schmidt
Well-designed national standards are necessary to improve schooling in the United States. Without such standards to guide our fragmented system, we will continue to fail our children. Even the best U.S. students do not perform as highly as the students of top-performing nations; governors and state education leaders have come to recognize the importance of addressing this lack of competitiveness through national standards.
In the United States, we spend a great deal of time arguing about why we should not have national standards. It's more important to consider the consequences of our not having national standards. International research has shown that top-achieving countries have focused, coherent, and rigorous national standards. These three characteristics can only be achieved when there is a national center. In a highly fragmented system with shared decision making, in which states and even individual districts often establish their own standards, these qualities are almost impossible to achieve.
My argument is twofold. First, if we want to make our students more competitive internationally, both for their own sake and for the nation, then a move to national standards gives schooling the chance to become more focused, coherent, and rigorous.
The second consequence of not enacting standards—a more serious one—is that large numbers of U.S. students will be left behind other U.S. students who simply receive better schooling. The current system, in which students are taught under different standards depending on where they live or the social class of their parents, is intolerable, especially in a democracy. Data show that school districts with higher concentrations of well-educated and well-off parents have more focused and demanding standards. These inequalities are built into the system. In effect, the playing field is not level, and the very students who most depend on schooling as a means to a better life are the ones who suffer.
My point is not to ignore potential negative effects of national standards, but to argue that not moving to such standards has graver consequences. It is detrimental to children's lives, the nation's economic prospects, and perhaps most important, to equal opportunity itself.
Chester E. Finn Jr.
Almost every successful modern nation on this shrinking planet has national education standards of some sort. The United States needs national standards, too, at least in core subjects.
There's no reason for 5th grade math to differ from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon, or for reading to be taught differently in Miami, Ohio, than it is in Miami, Florida. Ours is a mobile society that's developing national school "brands" (such as the Edison and KIPP schools). We have statewide virtual schools that soon will be nationwide, showing that curriculum can be uniform across state lines. Two recent Fordham Institute studies, The Proficiency Illusion and The Accountability Illusion, have demonstrated that having 50 different sets of state-specific standards has proven dysfunctional.
The United States has been edging toward national standards for a quarter century. It was the nation at risk, not just Illinois or Arizona, that the National Commission on Excellence in Education warned us about in 1983, and it wasnational education goals that President George H.W. Bush and the governors set in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1989.
What has stymied orderly movement has been our lack of any suitable, trusted mechanism for setting and maintaining national standards and the assessments that must accompany them if they're to have traction. Practically nobody wants the federal government to set and maintain the standards. And private, discipline-specific groups cannot be counted on to set standards properly; in the early 1990s, their efforts to set voluntary national standards crashed and burned. The National Assessment Governing Board, which decides what knowledge and skills the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) should measure, is a possible candidate to maintain national standards. But a lively argument can (and should) be had as to whether NAEP should evolve into a national test or remain the "external auditor." I tend toward the latter view.
The National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers have recently taken it upon themselves to develop "common core" standards in reading/writing and math for states to adopt if they like. I believe this voluntary approach is right. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said Race to the Top dollars will be used to develop accompanying assessments, although we don't yet know how or by whom. We still lack a durable, institutional arrangement for all of this, but we're finally headed in the right direction.
Phillip Schlechty
Will national standards encourage the pursuit of excellence in education? I think not. Rather, national standards will quickly morph into national assessments and a national system of enforcement, leading to trivialization and an emphasis on minimums. As I read about the work of the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, I fear that this is the direction in which we are headed.
Before we proceed with the development of national standards, we should take a closer look at Finland. Finland has a system of national standards, but it leaves assessment of students up to local communities. Before we establish national standards, we must do as Finland did and arrive at some agreement about the purposes of education in the 21st century and the kind of society we aspire to be. I find little in our discussion about standards that addresses such issues.
For bureaucrats and control-oriented managers, standards are rules. They establish minimums below which performance should not go. For democratically oriented school leaders and others who see education as the primary means of preserving "the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity," standards provide direction rather than control. They are sources of guidance rather than results to be achieved. They function more like satellites in a global positioning system than destinations on a map.
Standards should not be fixed points. Rather, they should mark a horizon. We need to understand standards as the ancient Greeks understood them: ideals to be pursued rather than pedestals upon which to stand. Excellence requires the pursuit of an ideal rather than compliance with minimum expectations.
Yong Zhao
National standards would take U.S. education further in the wrong direction without achieving the desired outcomes. The assumption that common standards will raise American students' achievement on international tests and thus enable the United States to compete globally and close its internal achievement gaps fuels the drive toward standards. But there is no evidence that common standards will accomplish this.
The United States is one of a small number of countries that does not have a national curriculum or standards. Judging from students' performance on international tests, countries with a decentralized curriculum do not necessarily perform worse than those with a national curriculum: Many nations with national standards perform much worse than the United States.
China is a well-known example of how establishing a national curriculum does not necessarily reduce achievement gaps. Despite years of a highly nationalized system and a homogeneous culture, China still sees significant gaps in test scores among students in different regions.
As a result of NCLB, all U.S. states have developed state standards and assessments; some have adopted common standards in core academic areas. But there is no clear evidence that these efforts have either significantly improved student achievement overall or narrowed achievement gaps.
The negative consequences of national standards are well documented. Common standards lead to distortion of the purpose of schooling and deprive students of a real education. Governments inevitably use high-stakes testing to enforce standards. Such testing forces teachers to focus on what is tested and spend less time on what is not. The focus of curriculum gets narrowed to a few subjects, and students wind up with a depressed education experience overall.
National standards stifle creativity and reduce diversity. To be creative is to be different, to deviate from the norm—but common standards demand a uniform way of thinking, learning, and demonstrating one's learning. Standardized testing rewards those who conform and penalizes those who deviate.
Those who happen to do well on a particular assessment are often considered successful, whereas those who do less well are labeled "at-risk," regardless of other strengths. A student who may be extremely talented in art but cannot pass the reading test in the time required, for instance, is deemed inadequate. A student who arrives at school without the skills and knowledge her classmates have is forced to fix "deficiencies" instead of developing strengths. As a result, talents are suppressed and wither. Once a standard is established, it becomes a uniform measure that's used to include or exclude people.
