Judging by your theme issue on “The Challenge of Higher Standards” (February 1993), the movement to create national standards is well under way. Soon the standards set by three large groups—the National Council of Teachers of English, the International Reading Association, and the Center for the Study of Reading—will affect every language arts teacher in the nation.
Average classroom teachers have one main concern about national standards: once standards are established and assessments of the standards are in place, will teachers and the children they teach be better off?
If experience with standardized tests and statewide proficiency assessments are indicative, the answer is no.
This is what will happen.
First, comparisons will be drawn among the assessment scores of districts, counties, and states. The results will tell us what we already know: some schools are having a hard time educating students. Nonetheless, the bad news will be trumpeted in countless bureaucratic reports, political speeches, and media commentaries.
Second, district officials will try mightily to raise scores, all the better to reduce political heat or garner some good publicity. They will “align” curriculum to the new assessments, and then, the manufacturers of newly “aligned” textbooks will make their entrance, glossy packets in hand.
Third, money will be pumped into lagging systems, but little of it will be used on initiatives like reducing class size or giving teachers more time to work with children. Resources will be soaked up hiring a specialist (my colleague's name for a specialist is “a clipboard and a coffee cup”), on central office reports, and on photocopiers that will be off-limits to teachers.
Fourth, standards will become standardized. How nice. A 3rd grader who moves in midyear from state to state will never miss a beat, since all schools will be on the same page. Even American Federation of Teachers President Albert Shanker, who should know better, touted such reasoning when he first endorsed the National Standards project.
Whatever became of the views of Alfred North Whitehead? In his often anthologized essay, “The Aims of Education,” Whitehead declared: The first requisite for school reform is the school as a unit, with its approved curriculum based on its own needs and evolved by its own staff. If we fail to secure that, we simply fall from one formalism into another, from one dung-hill of inert ideas into another (emphasis added).
Setting national standards will be worthwhile only if it improves what happens between teachers and students, and that will only happen if national tests are eliminated and standards are allowed to function as models rather than fixed rules.
Further, resources must be put into helping districts meet the standards, for as Whitehead commented, education depends: On several factors, none of which can be neglected, namely, the genius of the teacher, the intellectual type of the pupils, their prospects in life, the opportunities offered by the immediate surroundings of the school, and allied factors of this sort. It is for this reason that the uniform external examination is so deadly.
National testing, now called “assessment” in the Newspeak idiom, will do nothing to improve the genius of the teacher, students' prospects in life, or the opportunities in the immediate surroundings of the school.
Nor will assessment alleviate a bitter reality: regular classroom teachers today do not get the support that they need to pursue, adapt, and meet world-class standards. Teachers get no time, for example, to reflect upon learning theories, write and publish scholarly articles, or pursue grant money. Even as I write this, I wonder how many teachers will read it. Who has time?
Begrudging teachers adequate resources is serious, Theodore Sizer warns in Horace's School: People who are denied the tools and time they need quickly become discouraged; they believe that those responsible for their work do not respect it. Neglect breeds cynicism.
If America really wants to educate its children better, we cannot substitute assessment for proper support of the classroom teacher.
