To illustrate how standards can hurt children, Susan Ohanian, a veteran educator and author of One Size Fits Few: The Folly of Educational Standards, told her audience about Gracie.
"Last June I interviewed a 2nd grader who goes to school in the suburbs of Chicago," Ohanian related. "I asked Gracie at the end of the year what she'd read, and she told me: Junie B. Jones, Stuart Little, Dogzilla, Ramona—and she said, 'There must be a hundred more.'
"Gracie is in 3rd grade this year, and she and I still correspond," Ohanian continued. "I asked her the other day, 'How's school?' And she said, 'It's okay. We're learning cursive and the CAT.' The CAT test is the standardized test that kids in Illinois take. That's all she mentioned—'cursive and the CAT.' No mention of the books she's reading, because [her class is] just getting ready for the test. To me, that's a tragedy."
Ohanian underscored the absurdity of some state standards by quoting one for 7th graders from California. According to the standard, 7th grade students are expected to learn "the theological, political, and economic ideas of the major figures during the Reformation, such as Erasmus, Martin Luther, John Calvin, William Tyndale," "how the Counter-Reformation revitalized the Catholic church, and the forces that propelled the movement, such as St. Ignatius of Loyola, the Jesuits, and the Council of Trent," "the impact of missionaries on the diffusion of Christianity from Europe to other parts of the world in the early modern period, including their location on a world map"—and much, much more.
"That's one standard among 11, for 7th grade," Ohanian said. "The people who wrote the California standards for 7th grade couldn't possibly have talked to any 7th graders, and yet we're letting them take over our curriculum, take over the children's lives."
"I'd like to make sure that all the standardistos have been shut up in a room for at least an hour with 7th graders," Ohanian joked. "Do you think they'd last 15 minutes?"
In response to the standards, a number of grassroots protest movements have sprung up around the country, Ohanian said. (She showed her audience a T-shirt stating: "High Stakes Are for Tomatoes.") Many of these protest groups refer their members to FairTest as a place to get information, she noted. "FairTest is our central organization."
"Plutarch said it centuries ago: 'Education is not the filling of a bucket.' And I think that's a very good image," Ohanian said. Education is "not an assembly line of skills; it's not the dumping of things into a bucket. Instead, it's the lighting of a fire."
"We have to tell the standardistos to stop treating children like buckets," she urged. "We must refuse to participate in the fire brigade of bucket filling, because that's what we're being asked to do. Our classrooms mustn't be test preparation zones."