Few ideas are more central to the educational reform movement currently underway in America than that of standards. Virtually everyone thinks we need them and that efforts to improve our schools will certainly fail unless standards can be developed and made public. Standards will provide both targets and incentives. Students will know what to aim for; teachers will understand how effective they have been; and, perhaps most important, the public will know how well schools are succeeding.
Amidst the enthusiasm, nevertheless, an undercurrent suggests that standards may not be the answer and that the concept itself may impede the realization of the vision of education that many educators hold.
At the outset, we should acknowledge that the term “standards” has multiple meanings. Standards can refer to those targets at which one aims. Standards can serve as icons against which student performance is compared. The term “standard” can also refer to something that is common or typical. Standards are sometimes used in relation to a rite of passage that provides access to future opportunities. For example, “He has met the standards we have set and is now able to practice medicine.”
In addition to these conceptions, standards, as Dewey pointed out in Art as Experience, are units of measurement. We have a standard unit of measurement we call ounces, another we call pounds, and still others called inches, feet, miles, kilometers, and statute miles. All of these standards are socially defined units that quantify qualities. What we experience as height, we can transform into feet and inches. What we experience as heat, we can transform into temperature.
There is, of course, a fundamental difference between the experience of heat or height and their description through standards we call centigrade or inches. Knowing heat as an experience is not like knowing heat as temperature. Thus, one important feature of a standard as a unit of measurement is that it functions as a symbol that possesses none of the qualities of what it has measured.
Another feature of standards, and this feature is crucial from an educational perspective, is that, as a unit of measurement, a standard is a vehicle for describing, rather than appraising, a set of qualities. When we apply standards in Dewey's terms, we get answers to questions that pertain to matters of amount. Yet what we want regarding the outcomes of our teaching are not simply matters of amount but matters of goodness. We want to achieve, or help students achieve, what we or they value.
Given this latter conception, standards by themselves will never be adequate for determining whether what a student has done or understands is of value. To determine matters of value, we need something more.
Criteria, Not Standards
The something more we need are criteria. Criteria facilitate the search for qualities we value within an essay, a scientific experiment, a painting, a work of history, and the like. These works, Dewey argues and I concur, are not susceptible to measurement by standards, although they are amenable to appraisal by criteria.
Having said that, it should be acknowledged that once a standard is assigned a value, it can be applied to those forms of performance or products for which there is a fixed correct answer. With a standard, we simply lay down the appropriate unit and count the correctness or incorrectness of the responses. We can apply standards to spelling and to arithmetic. We can apply standards to most forms of punctuation and to the determination of standard grammatical usage. While the application of standards to such topics is useful and efficient, standards do not represent the most important ends we seek in education. What we value in education is not simply teaching children to replicate known answers or to mimic conventional forms. We seek work that displays ingenuity, complexity, and the student's personal signature. In short, we seek work that displays the student's intelligent judgment. Work of this kind requires that we also exercise judgment in appraising its value.
This judgment depends, I am arguing, on the availability of criteria. The application of criteria requires the exercise of judgment, the ability to provide reasons for the judgments we make, and an understanding of which criteria are relevant to the genre of the work. Applying criteria is a much more complicated and intellectual enterprise than applying a standard. Hence, when we talk about using standards as a lever for educational reform, we grossly oversimplify what is required.
The problem of assessment, however, is considerably more complicated than the distinction between standards and criteria that I have just drawn. Within the context of schooling, teachers do—and indeed they ought to—take into account not only the qualities of the student's work but other considerations that pertain to the individual student. Experienced and skilled teachers know that when they appraise a student's work, they need to consider where that student started, the amount of practice and effort expended, the student's age and developmental level, and the extent to which his or her current work displays progress. Although such considerations are not particularly relevant for appraising the work of professionals, they are relevant for appraising the educational development of the student.
But even if we were to consider only the student's work, we would still have the problem of determining how standards—even when they are relevant to the work—should be derived. Should standards be derived from the performance of the particular population of students from which a student comes or from the school district as a whole, the state, the region of the country, or the nation? Should standards be formulated from the performance of students in suburbs or inner cities? From those in the 50th percentile or in the 75th? Is it fair to have the same standards for all students when we know that some students come to school without breakfast while others are driven to school in expensive automobiles? Should we employ the same standards in schools that barely have enough resources to open their doors while others are the educational equivalent of Neiman Marcus? Just what is appropriate, and just what is fair?
Furthermore, what do we do with the information after the standards have been applied? Will we know what needs to be done by examining the performance of students in relation to fixed standards?
It is characteristic of our culture, and particularly our attitude towards education, to seek some magic wand, some golden lever, that we can employ to make things right. I do not argue here that our schools are in good shape. Some schools are wonderful, many schools are dreadful, and most schools, from my perspective, need to generate a much greater sense of intellectual vitality and challenge than they now possess. I cannot help but wonder whether this emphasis on standards is likely to move schools in the direction that I value. I do not value schools that regard children as an army marching toward fixed and uniform goals. Standardization is already too pervasive in our culture. We need to celebrate diversity and to cultivate the idiosyncratic aptitudes our students possess. Certainly, an array of common learning is appropriate for almost all students in our schools, but the preoccupation with uniform standards, common national goals, curriculums, achievement tests, and report cards rings in a theme that gives me pause. I believe we would do far better to pay more attention to the quality of our workplace and to the character of our teaching than to display such preoccupations with standards. If we can create schools that excite both teachers and students and provide the conditions that improve the quality of teaching, we will do much to create schools that genuinely educate.
The current emphasis on standards will provide no panacea in education. Paying close attention to how we teach and building institutions that make it possible for teachers to continue to grow as professionals may be much more effective educationally than trying to determine through standard means whether or not our students measure up.
