Robert D. Shepherd, one of our many brilliant readers, offered the following explanation of the impulse to standardize the education of children across the nation:
“It’s no secret that income inequality has skyrocketed in the United States in recent decades, that economic and social mobility have plummeted, that wealth has been increasingly concentrated at the top, and that increasingly, the affluent in this country are isolated in their own circles–living in their own separate neighborhoods; sending their kids to their own separate schools from preschool through college; keeping their money offshore; spending much of their time in homes outside the country; and so on.
“Isolation from ordinary people breeds contempt and prejudice. Lack of intimate, long-term interaction with ordinary people makes it easier for the wealthy to generalize about “those people,” whoever they might be–workers, teachers, the poor, etc., and to buy into across-the-board, one-size-fits-all prescriptions regarding those Others. It becomes easy to think that it makes sense that we have a top-down, mandated, invariant curriculum for the masses based upon the vise of invariant standards on the one side and invariant tests on the other if one thinks of teachers, students, workers, the poor–of any group of people outside the privileged class–as homogenous. “If only we held those people accountable via a standardized test!” begins to sound sensible, even though giving the same test to every third grader is equivalent to giving the same certification exam to plumbers, doctors, airplane mechanics, and NBA players. And when the privileged, with all their accomplishments and clout, make such generalizations, others buy in out of fear and self interest and, of course, respect. How could a man as clearly brilliant and skilled as, say, Bill Gates, be so terribly wrong? Our politicians left and right have almost entirely bought into the absurd generalizations underpinning the accountability movement. And our educational “leaders” have lacked all leadership; they haven’t had the courage to say that the emperor has no clothes.
“There are two main issues here: First, we can have liberty, or we can have standardized objectives (and, inevitably, the standardized curricula that follow from them) mandated by a small, centralized, unaccountable, totalitarian authority. Second, we can recognize students’ uniqueness and diversity and foster their individual propensities and talents, or we can give them a homogenous, one-size-fits-all education.
“It’s astonishing to me that there is even any debate about which we should do. And it’s horrifying that our “leaders”–professional education people–have come down so often on the side of taking away educators’ autonomy, their ability to make their own decisions about what to teach, when, and to whom.”
Hi Diane,
Got this from a NY listserv. The article is interesting, but even more compelling is the comments at the end by the student described in the article. Reminds me of what they tried to do in Wake County, NC when they integrated the schools by socio-economic status, not race. Test scores went up. Of couse, the school board was later tossed out by conservatives who did not like busing white kids.
Tom Smith Hightstown, NJ
For a Father’s Day treat read this article (from today’s Syracuse Post Standard) about one of our own. Great article Rob – THIS is why we teach!! (made my morning – so thanks!) http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2013/06/once-struggling_syracuse_stude.html#incart_m-rpt-2
…with other people’s money…
Although the Common Core purports to value critical thinking, choosing “sides” is what passes for critical thinking these days. The right answer is the one backed by money and fame, not inquiry or the scientific method.
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Crack-Up” (1936)
US novelist (1896 – 1940)
It seems there is a Core trend to eliminate opposing ideas.
While proponents of the Common Core claim to value “critical thinking,” the tests these same proponents are imposing on our children are computer-scored, a method that has proven to be unable to assess critical thinking- only “rudimentary text-production skills” http://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/RD_Connections_21.pdf So much for higher order thinking
“…First, we can have liberty, or we can have standardized objectives (and, inevitably, the standardized curricula that follow from them) mandated by a small, centralized, unaccountable, totalitarian authority.”
This is what alarms me the most. This type of misguided authoritative government standardization and control is occurring, not only in education but also, in media, car manufacturing, banking, housing, taxation, health care, the food industry (GMOs), etc. While some policies and regulations are required, local control and professional discretion is rapidly disappearing. As educators this situation is especially frustrating because children are so negatively affected. While we instinctively and experientially know what is best for our students, our hands are often tied. If those in power could also silence us they would. Today, it takes great courage to teach and truly put students first. To do so often means risking your job.
When I was in a university ed program for certification to teach, I was blinded by my preconceived notion that teaching was about erudition and encouragement, etc.
What I found instead was that teaching is a workplace first and the there exists a hierarchy of power and money in labor relations between teachers and administrators. akin to the industrial revolution model or factory managers and workers.
After seeing the corruption of our public ed district administrators, I gradually began to understand why the privatization movement could take hold as it has.
The “blame the teacher” accountability game really got started in urban school districts where the achievement gap had to be explained. After all, there had to be some fault-based liability somewhere. And those with the big paychecks, pensions, and reputations would not fall on their swords and confess that the buck stopped with them and they just couldn’t figure out how to devise and implement policy that would address the problems in urban public education. In short, the problem really is a political one and not about pedagogy and teacher effectiveness, etc. Someone needed to take the courageous political stance that told some parents that they were lousy parents and the schools simply cannot do that job for them.
Enter the privateers who saw that as quasi-private/public schools, they could retain the high paying management structure and avoid the legal harness public schools had to deal with vis a vis, school discipline and suspension rates, etc. And both charter school administrators and public school administrators could both benefit by doing the age-old two step of taking the focus off of yourself by pointing at someone else. Simply put, both continue to blame teachers or teacher’s unions or whatever way the same message could be publicized–blame teacher effectiveness.
So here we are, public education is slowly being hybridized into public/private school districts while the outcome for our nation’s poorest students is either not getting better or is getting worse.
And for those of you who view this post as polemic, I ask you one question:
Why are charter schools only appearing in communities of color and low socio-economic status?
“Someone needed to take the courageous political stance that told some parents that they were lousy parents and the schools simply cannot do that job for them.”
Transferring the blame to parents really isn’t helpful. Yes, lack of attentive, nurturing parenting is a problem for many low income children which affects their school performance, but that poor parenting is as much a symptom as poor school performance. The problem is poverty and income inequality. When poverty is addressed – when parents have basic resources and at least a minimal level of respect and self-determination, both parenting and school performance start to rise.
Cumberland, RI – app. 95% white
First Mayoral Academy in RI and expanding. Much higher per pupil expenditure than the local public school which has the lowest per pupil expenditure in the state.
Whatever the psychological factors may be — the aching nostalgia of the imaginary aristocrats for the days before the unwashed masses got a hankering for self-government — that is not the real power behind their imaginary thrones.
We need to look further …
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
: )
“The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats
There is a major issue with having non standardized schools and using geography to determine school admission policies. Part of the reason schools are standardized is to convince parents that it does not matter which school their children attend, they all look pretty much alike. If schools stop looking pretty much alike, it will matter which school a student attends and this will pressure school boards to allow students to choose schools.
It seems to me you can only have geographically determined school admission in a world of school uniformity.
You make an excellent point, teachingeconomist
These debates become so abstract. I went to public school in the 70s and 80s. There was no “Common Core” but curriculum were still largely standardized through the textbook industry. There was one kind of math. There was one history textbook in History class. We diagrammed sentences using the same grammar. And the class sizes were large; there was no individualized instruction beyond what a teacher might impart in a brief aside during class.
There were some AP classes. And there were electives. There were far fewer standardized tests, of course, which was a good thing. But the education itself was pretty standardized.
We had a common curriculum because the academic and educational communities were largely in agreement about the knowledge base that citizens would need to function in a democratic society — with luck priming the pumps it would take them to actualize their full potentials as individuals throughout their lives.
Publishing companies were involved in the process, of course, but they by and large took their marching and their purchase orders from the communities who knew what education was — just the reverse of the tail-wagging-the-dog system that corporate interests and their political lap-dogs are forcing into place today.
I think that’s essentially right. Then you had the backlash against “loosey-goosey” and “feelgood” approaches to pedagogy, and the panic over the diversification of culture and canons. I would guess that’s when government started its big push toward legislating curriculum through standards.
The country has passed through wave after wave of curriculum reform and re-visioning for as long as long as anyone can remember. Some of those phases, like the Sputnik Era Boosterism of Rocket Science, etc. that my cohort came in with, may have been responses to geopolitical issues, but things went in cycles that depended on academic hamsters to drive the wheels thereof.
What we are seeing today is very different in character, and I think we have to look elsewhere for the engines driving the process.
I spoke up just as you did and because in Wisconsin our unions were dissolved , administrators became bullies and I was non-renewed after 12 years in my district. Never a bad thing said about me to my face…never a negative mark on an evaluation…parents requesting me…actively involved…test scores high and improving…so be careful how you say what you need to say. It is an ugly profession for some areas right now.
It’s amazing that we all graduated and went on to college to earn our respected degrees. How in the world did we all go on to become successful educators with a passion for teaching our students? Those teachers who taught us must have done something right along the way. I doubt that it mattered so much what content we were taught when, at each grade. I suspect it had much to do with their own passion and autonomy within reason to instill in us a love of learning. Yes, there was a curriculum, probably with a scope and sequence, but those teachers were allowed to be professionals and to use their knowledge to teach us what we needed to know at each grade level. As a student of the 60s and 70s I learned how to be a learner, and much of what I know today I have probably learned on my own. That is because I was taught by teachers who instilled in me a passion to know more and a work ethic to search it out. I doubt that any standardized test could produce data to measure those skills.
I find that many who comment negatively on children of poverty and the parenting skills of those in high poverty usually have very little actual experience working with them over the long term. It is such a very complicated issue and there are no solutions that work in isolation. I once thought I had the answers. But having tried over the years, I now know that if it were that simple it would have been accomplished long ago. All I can do for now is walk the walk with my high poverty students and be as supportive as I can by connecting families with community resources. When I hear the Edudeformers with their solutions that sound Oh So Simple, I want to laugh. But it is not so funny. It is shameful. The shame is that what they profess is good for “other people’s children” is never what is good enough for their own. We know what works in education. It is the same thing that works for the children of our Edudeformers and our President and our Education Secretary.