Steve Singer, a teacher in Pennsylvania, warns that the standardization movement will crush educators and students. He sees no value in having a single set of national standards. Is there a school that doesn’t teach reading and writing, mathematics and basic skills? No. If there were, taxpayers would soon close it. Should states legislate about evolution? Good grief, no. Either they would legislate not to teach it, or to give equal time to creationism, or they would then think it necessary to legislate their views on every controversial school issue.
Singer sees the drive to standardize the schools as similar to having every restaurant become a McDonald’s.
We shouldn’t want all of our public schools to be uniform. When everyone teaches the same things, it means we leave out the same things. There is far too much to know in this world than can ever be taught or learned in one lifetime. Choices will always need to be made. The question is who should make them?
If we allow individuals to make different choices, it diversifies what people will know. Individuals will make decisions, which will become the impetus to learning, which will then become intrinsic and therefore valued. Then when you get ten people together from various parts of the country, they will each know different things but as a whole they will know so much more than any one member. If they all know the same things, as a group they are no stronger, no smarter than each separate cog. That is not good for society.
We certainly don’t want this ideal when going out to eat. We don’t want every restaurant to be the same. We certainly don’t want every restaurant to be McDonalds.
Imagine if every eatery was a burger joint. That means there would be no ethnic food. No Mexican. No Chinese. No Italian. There would be nothing that isn’t on that one limited menu. Moreover, it would all be prepared the same way. Fast food restaurants excel in consistency. A Big Mac at one McDonalds is much like a Big Mac at any other. This may be comforting but – in the long run – it would drive us insane. If our only choices to eat were on a McDonald’s Value Menu, we would all soon die of diabetes.
But this is what we seem to want of our public schools. Or do we?
There is a bait and switch going on in this argument for school standardization. When we talk about making all schools the same, we’re not talking about all schools. We’re only talking about traditional public schools. We’re not talking about charter schools, parochial schools or private schools.
How strange! The same people who champion this approach rarely send their own children to public schools. They want sameness for your children but something much different for their own.
The strangest contradiction occurs when the same people advocate on one hand for school choice, but on the other for no choice about what children should learn.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The point about students needing choice, particularly in secondary education, is critically important. And it is demanded by any sensible specification of the *goals* of education. The late Robert E. Simon made this point powerfully in an interview I did with him that the Answer Sheet published in September: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/09/22/issues-over-the-last-decade-have-me-really-steamed-a-history-making-centenarians-views-on-school-reform/
“Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think.”
Albert Einstein
“…Dewey (1938) would find the standardization of American education to be a reversion to the “traditional schools” that he so adamantly denounces in his many works. While we live in a progressive era which protects the rights of individual students more than any other time in history, the movement to standardize education is destroying both the ability and freedom of students to think critically and creatively by forcing students to develop rudimentary habits designed simply to meet certain expectations on standardized tests. If the aforementioned symbiotic relationship that Dewey professes holds true, the United States is destined to produce a generation of individuals who have been created out of the same intellectual mold where complex issues are ignored in favor of a mass assimilation of facts…”
Dewey and Standardization: A Philosophical Look at the Implications for Social Studies
Click to access MS_06100_Journell_Final_copy.pdf
Spring 2007 Wayne Journell University of Illinois
“The strangest contradiction occurs when the same people advocate on one hand for school choice, but on the other for no choice about what children should learn.”
It’s not a contradiction. It’s absolutely essential for a deregulated, privatized model. Without the standards and testing they couldn’t do it.
Schools are contract service providers in a publicly-funded marketplace and the customer is assured of “quality” and “basic services” by the external guardrails of standards and testing rather than regulation.
They’ll never actually regulate, BTW. Instead they’ll say the market simply needs more “transparency” and then market forces will work because consumers will be informed. It’s textbook free market ideology.
So glad we’re labeling the majority of children as failures in third grade:
“The Arizona Department of Education released scores for the state’s new standardized test Monday, showing what many already expected: a very low percentage of students passed English and math subjects.
The scores for AzMerit show that only 34 percent of all students passed the English test, while 35 percent passed the math one.”
The least we could do is tell them the truth and drop the nonsense about “nuance” and “multiple measures”. The number looks scientific and objective so it’s easy to use as a proxy.
http://tucson.com/news/state-and-regional/test-scores-for-new-arizona-test-reveal-many-students-fail/article_1625bf93-08c8-54c4-a500-e9b244eea8d6.html
It has never been about children and learning.
Only about Billions4Billionaires!
Why standardize all public schools and insist on charter choice? Improve education? NOPE! NEVER WAS! STILL NOT ABOUT OUR KIDS OR TEACHING!
We can discuss the Real Field of Education until the cows come home – never was or is about teaching and learning. These corpProfiteers would criticize Mother Theresa for wearing a blue and white dress, if it served them financially. Not about humanity, altruism, our children’s future…ALL ABOUT THEIR $B.
Truth, they have enough $Zill to continue this forever.
“Off with their heads!”
Not only do so-called reformers argue that students and parents should have no choice in what is learned, but they also insist that students not have the choice of attending a well-funded and resourced neighborhood public school.
Is our only choice between, rigid punitively enforced standards and every teacher doing whatever they see fit? A few thoughts from several years ago here: http://www.arthurcamins.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Past-Gets-In-Our-Eyes1.pdf
Thank you so much for writing about my article, Diane. Common Core has been a huge mistake in education policy. People are starting to see that now. It’s expensive, unpopular, unproven, developmentally inappropriate and was developed by the testing industry without substantial input from classroom teachers. However, the danger in moving forward is that some folks will say the problem was merely in implementation or that the Common Core standards are bad but we can develop better ones. NO! The very idea of national education standards is unnecessary, reductive, reactionary and needlessly limiting to teacher autonomy.
Then the question becomes,
“Then what will you teach?”
and when will you teach it?”
For any experienced math or ELA teacher, the answer is just not that complex. One of the keys to perpetrating the the snake oil, Common Core sales job was to intentionally mystify the simple and obfuscate the obvious. Now that the curtain has been pulled back on the entire bunch of know-nothing amateurs, the system should rebound nicely.
Steve, I am in the process of doing an analysis of “national standards” written just before and since the 2010 launch of the Common Core. I am doing this as a parallel to an earlier study of the Goals 2000 project. This time I am focusing only on Pre-K to grade 8, giving attention to which standards bear the imprints of the CCSS and what the “ideal” student should know and be able to do—the sum total of expectations for students, grade-by-grade.
Except for the CCSS (required for states that sought federal RTT funds) all of these newer standards are “voluntary.” Just as there was no coordination or cross checking for redundancy (and contradictions) in the Goals 2000 project, there is little concern for the redundancies, overlaps, and just plain weirdness of some of the current standards. Jargon is often thick.
Our early 21st century standards differ widely in specificity, clarity, sponsorship, and so on. Some of the writers rely on taxonomies of content and/or “skills.” Others just seem to think of writing standards as not different from writing rubrics—-you change a word or two to make the same idea “seem “ to become part of a learning progression. The standards also differ in that some refer to grade spans while others have specific grade level assignments. Of course, most of these “national” initiatives to formalize standards are started with the hope of securing more time and resources for instruction.
Beyond that, the standards say much about the adults who write, review, and approve the standards, how they think about children and young people, how they construe the world as it is and might be, and the degree to which teachers can and should be managed through standards.
I am a public school teacher; before my current position, I taught at a test-obsessed charter school. (I wrote about my experience here: http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2015/11/guest-post-no-excuse.html .) I know first-hand the dangers of over-testing and adherence to developmentally inappropriate standards and tests and I will fight tooth and nail so that this does not become the norm in our country.
HOWEVER: I think that the analogy above is inapt, and I don’t think that it actually detracts from the argument against supposedly skill-based tests. (Though it does detract from other, content-based tests.) In an ideal world, a good and truly skill-based standardized test would function not as a way to make all restaurants into McDonalds, but more like the Health Inspections Board. The Health Inspections Board ensures that restaurants can be as creative as they like without harming anyone who walks through their doors.
I haven’t yet made up my mind about whether such a thing is possible in our current political climate, but I do think it’s worth considering.
First-hand experience teaching at a no-excuses charter school taught me why standardized test obsession and one-size-fits-all curricula are a slippery, slippery slope that should not by any means become the norm in this country. (I wrote about my experience at this charter network here: http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2015/11/guest-post-no-excuse.html .)
HOWEVER, I believe that this analogy is imperfect: it fits “content-based” tests (which, indeed, would ensure that all schools— er, restaurants— serve the same thing.) In an ideal world (which, granted, probably does not exist), though, a “skill-based” test would function less like a McDonalds-making machine and more like the Health Inspections Board, ensuring that restaurants would do no harm to anyone who walks through their doors while maintaining creative liberty.
The problem with your idea is that skills-based tests perpetuate the current ubiquitous attempts to “teach” reading and writing. This is a mistake. To make good readers and writers, you do not teach them reading and writing, you teach them content…and then they can read and write about that content. There is no generic reading and writing skill that can be taught; reading and writing ability is always a patchy affair, wherein strengths are always coextensive with one’s knowledge base. If you want a kid to be a good reader and writer about chemistry, you have to teach her chemistry. If you want the kid to be a good reader and writer IN GENERAL, you have to teach him about things IN GENERAL. Direct teaching of general knowledge is the only route to making good general readers and writers. The fact that most teachers today conceive of their jobs as “teaching reading and writing”, and not teaching about the world we live in, is one of the great disasters of modern education. Read E.D. Hirsch and cognitive scientist Dan Willingham for compelling proof of my thesis.
Exactly Ponderosa. This is why the empty skill sets of Common Core ELA are doomed to failure. Already seeing Coleman’s dream of context free reading and writing evaporating in practice. Classroom teachers are not fools and if it doesn’t work, we stop doing it. However we are a long way off from ED Hirsch’s vision of a content based curriculum, teaching the important facts and ideas that any reasonably well educated citizen should know. Ignorance is a dangerous trade-off.
Thank you ponderosa for succinctly identifying the empty promises of “skills-based” standards. What do all writers have in common? They are readers! If you want to write for readers, you have to know what readers like. This is why I object to colleges of education. If you want to teach math, get a degree in math. One can learn to teach math through mentoring. It does not require an entire college to acquire the classroom skills needed to teach.
The colleges of education may make sense for younger grades, pre-K through 4th or 5th grade, but once students start to change classes for specific instruction, subject expertise is paramount. Teaching skills are essential, but they are only effective when layered on top of subject expertise.
Today’s writing gurus make it seem as if kids struggle to write mostly because no one has taught them how to do little skills like use transition words such as “although”. If only! In my experience kids who grasp a topic can write about it. Period. It may not be the most polished writing, but it will get the job done. The reason most kids can’t write about most things is that they don’t know anything about those things. So the bulk of the writing problem in American schools is a KNOWING problem. Kids don’t know enough. If we want a kid to write about politics, teach him about politics! If we want a kid to write about a wide range of topics, teach him a wide range of topics. My seventh grade “bad writers” are stunned when they crank out three page history essays without much problem. What changed? They had learned a lot about the topic before they wrote. American educators’ current fixation on writing and writing programs obfuscates this big truth: writers can only write about what they know; ergo, to teach writing you need to teach knowledge. We’ve wasted SO much time on this quixotic quest to teach writing directly when the best way to teach writing is to teach about the world. When will this folly end? I wish all the writing gurus of America would close up shop and turn their energies to helping the content area teachers teach their content more lucidly so that American students could acquire a bright, shiny, detailed model of the world in their brains about which they could then write articulately.
I agree whole-heartedly with Singer’s thesis, but the argument has a few holes. Charter-lovers will tell you they need public dollars to make those cheap yet consistent McEd lesson plans available for the poor folks. Evangelicals will note that his foundation– that diversity makes for superior adaptation to the environment– is Darwinian. And don’t think for a minute the deep-pocket standardizers aren’t this very minute trying to figure out how to buffalo middle, upper-middle, & even rich parents into charterizing their districts.
While we’re at it, let’s try to peel back the pre-nat’l-stds traditional pub-sch model a few layers as well. Back to before ed-publishing houses get a stranglehold on state ed depts. I’ll wager every blasted pedagogical fad got its start among ‘ed experts’ funded by those monopolies to ensure a regular flow of brand-new, 400%-markup mat’l’s to public schools.
Some colleagues and I had a related conversation today. Our school is in danger of being taken over by our state because our scores are so low. As a result, over the past 5 years, the parameters of teacher choice have been more and more limited. Now we are given Common tests all students taking a particular course must have. Our pacing is much too fast for many of our students, especially in math and social studies courses. There is no depth to our instruction in an effort to cover as much as possible. The common tests are extremely difficult, and the common finals even worse. This effort to demand more of our students would be great IF it hadn’t started at the high school level where students in our school have HUGE gaps in their basic skills. Instead of starting with younger students and making sure the kids have the background and basic skills to handle higher level thinking, our district just tells us to make it work. I’m looking at retiring much sooner than I had planned. And don’t get me started on what we’re being asked to do with our special education students and their IEPs!
drakestraw says:
“This effort to demand more of our students would be great IF it hadn’t started at the high school level where students in our school have HUGE gaps in their basic skills. Instead of starting with younger students and making sure the kids have the background and basic skills to handle higher level thinking, our district just tells us to make it work….” That needs to be shouted form the house tops!
There is a connection between the reading program 12th graders have in the primary grades and the level of achievement they have reached in 12th grade. Cunningham and Stanovich (1997) found that first-grade reading achievement strongly predicts 11th-grade reading achievement.
Problem #1 Common Core’s ELA Standards are anchored in a phonetic approach to teaching reading. There is a single spelling across dialects that pronounce words very differently. Coleman and his Work Group have a misconstrue notion that a heavy dose of phonics and sight words will develop successful readers. Not true.
“Familiar words can be read as fast as single letters. Under some conditions, words can be identified when the separate letters cannot be. Meaningful context speeds word identification. All phonics can be expected to do is help children get approximate pronunciations.” Becoming a Nation of Readers p. 11
Problelm #2 “Closed reading” – the lack of prior knowledge is a very basic problem. Just because students didn’t pass the state tests doesn’t mean they can’t read- they are simply asked to read material that they can’t relate to. In order to construct meaning the reader must be able to relate to what he/she is reading.
Frank Smith, a psycholinguist, in Comprehension and Learning maintains that what is behind the eye ball is more important than what is in front- the visual/text.” But instead of building on their prior knowledge, Common Core directs teachers to the practice of “Close Reading.”
Problem #3 Common Core directives forcing the students to read material that is too challenging.
Oh the damage that will be done if teachers adhere to that directive. Our reading problems will escalate and the Reading Gap will just get wider. The text that the teacher gives the students for guided reading in order to develop skills and strategies should be on their instructional level. A student having difficulty reading on level should be given easy and interesting material that he/she can relate to. Instead he given material that is too challenging rather than easy. A challenge that is too difficult, raises the anxiety level so that reading is neither meaningful nor pleasant.
Frank Smith maintains, “The problem of a fifteen-year-old who has difficulty reading may not be insufficiency of instruction, but that his previous years of instruction have made learning to read more difficult. …After ten years of instructional bruising a student may be far more in need of a couple of years …in education convalescence than an aggravation of his injuries.”
Nothing succeeds like success and nothing is more detrimental to one’s success then when he/she constantly meets with failure such as with the standardized tests. When will the corporate world and politicians realize the importance of self-esteem in education. How sad to hear an 80 year old man who is convinced and says, “I’m stupid.” when it is obvious that he is quite the opposite.
Please call congress today and ask them to vote NO on the reauthorization of the NCLB bill. It’s a 1,600 page bill that chains us to Common Core for at least five more years, and punishes parents and schools who opt out of the testing.
202-224-3121
I teach at a community college in upstate NY. My college has an archival room of material on local history, and every semester I take my remedial students to the room, where they are entertained by a lecture from a local historian/archivist and a librarian.
This year, the archives received a donation of documents from the family of the town’s founder, and the historian told the students about the history of the area and how these documents contributed to it. In a classroom discussion a week later (after Thanksgiving), the students unanimously commented on how interesting it was to know the history of their own area, and “I went to school here, and I never knew who founded the town,” and “I drive past that house every day, and no one ever told me it was historical,” and “it’s so much more interesting when it’s about places I know” (from a student who “hates history”).
ONE SIZE DOES NOT FIT ALL! I live in an area rich in history, especially the history of the French & Indian Wars, and my students consistently look blank at any mention of the historical events that happened on their doorsteps.
Ponderosa 12/2 stated, “.. I wish all the writing gurus of America would close up shop and turn their energies to helping the content area teachers teach their content more lucidly…”
Ouch! Background knowledge is an absolute necessity for writing but children need more than that. All knowledge is at the students’ finger tips with the clicking of a key. They need to learn the techniques of writing. There are many great, clever, entertaining and informative children’s writers of every genre waiting for teachers and parents to read their stories to children. Their stories indirectly exemplify the use of various tools including that of writing.
Just yesterday my praises went out to our phenomenal writers of children’s books. When my three-year-old grandson told his parents,
“Once a upon a time there was a teacher named Ms. Rose. She fell. The children laughed. A boy asked if she was OK. The end.”
The next time his mother saw his pre k teacher she told her about the odd story her son told. The pre k teacher told her that she had tripped and fell. All the children laughed except her son. He asked if she was OK/alright. At three years old my grandson already has a sense of story structure, but he has more than that. He has a sense of empathy. I attribute that to our phenomenal writers of children’s books.
Since birth my son and his wife have always read to the boys every night- part of their nightly ritual. The boys now choose what stories they want read. In infancy my son did more singing than reading. Now he is doing more reading. His three year old has heard so many stories that he has a sense of story structure, but what really touches my heart is his concern for his teacher. He is a very giving boy. He is very sensitive, too. No doubt it is a mixture of the stories read to him along with his parents modeling. With good literature, we have conflicts and challenges that need to be over come. The children constantly hear about characters who meet a challenge or deal with an inner conflict. They hear about how the characters are helpful, kind, and extend themselves to others. Take Eric Carle’s books for example; each book is anchored in nature: caterpillar, spider, turtle, ladybug, kangaroo etc. There is tension reflected in each one but in the end the character succeeds in his struggle.
After reading a story, my son always talks about the stories read and connects the story to his sons’ lives – he is great at that. Often he has his son pretend that he is the main character and has his son retell the story via the pictures. Non fiction is also sprinkled in with the mix. The oldest has ventured out into space and nature.
Reading to children is a great tool to attain many objectives but we need skillful writers. If parents only realized what a powerful tool they have in good literature not only to develop a responsible, caring person but also an inquisitive and imaginative person. Parents can do at home what the Common Core halts.
All my children have read to their children from birth on. All my grandchildren have a phenomenal imagination, and among other abilities, they are great writers- thanks to the skillful children’s writers who have not only touched their hearts and imaginations but have given examples to emulate. Of course they are all successful readers.
Our libraries are chuck full of gold mines.