Arthur Camins has written an insightful critique of the current debate over standards. As he puts it, “the past gets in our eyes.”
Camins begins:
“The Common Core State Standards for Reading and Mathematics appear to be simultaneouslyunstoppable trains and under siege, making strange bedfellows of both supporters and opponents.
Two issues cloud the debate about their validity, value and efficacy: (1) The idea of standards
has been conflated with standardization; (2) Standards have become inextricably linked to highstakes assessments. This has superseded a deeper meaning of assessment- the daily cycle of
diagnosis and feedback to students that marks the practice of every effective teacher.
However, there is something deeper contributing the cloudiness. I am reminded of a classic
Peanuts cartoon in which Lucy laments upon missing a fly ball, “Sorry I missed that easy fly ball,
manager. I thought I had it, but suddenly I remembered all the others I’ve missed. The past got in
my eyes!”
Camins notes a strange paradox: The supporters of “reform” says that the best schools (i.e., charters and vouchers) have autonomy, while the opponents of the Common Core say that teachers need autonomy.
He writes:
“Ironically, the critique of standards as unwarranted, creativity-stifling impositionsis grounded in many of the same autonomy assumptions about the power of unencumbered individuals to drive innovation and improvement. For example, many supporters and critics appear to share the idea that regulation stifles creativity. What separates the two perspectives is a different notion of size and characteristics of the group that can be trusted with autonomy. For supporters of standards, high-stakes assessments, charter schools, and privatization, the group to be counted upon is small: the really smart entrepreneurs. For some opponents, the number is large: virtually everyone.
Curious, this idea that schools should have autonomy, but teachers should not.
Read this provocative article.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
There is no question whatsoever that autonomy drives innovation.
The deformers who support having a small, distant, totalitarian authority dictate standards and evaluation criteria for students, teachers, and schools have A LOT in common with the state department bureaucrats who have vastly curtailed the autonomy of individual teachers, schools and districts over the past thirty years.
Let’s make this concrete by considering a particular example. Suppose that a small, independent educational publisher comes up with an innovative approach to teaching, say, English grammar. The publisher understands that grammars are almost entirely learned not from explicit instruction but via an innate language acquisition device in the brain that intuits syntactic, morphological, and semantic structures from the ambient linguistic environment. The publisher further understands that the linguistic environments that children grow up in vary enormously and that some of these environments are extraordinarily impoverished. Some children are exposed, during a critical period in their linguistic development, to spoken language containing a very narrow range of syntactic, morphological, and semantic structures (there is a great deal of evidence supporting this), and so the child’s internal device for building a model of, for example, the rules for formation of relative clauses or the rules governing the order of precedence of adjectives hasn’t the necessary material in the ambient linguistic environment from which to work. The publisher believes that in order to address this problem, it’s important to create compensating spoken language environments involving active use of spoken language containing increasingly sophisticated syntactic, morphological, and semantic forms. A curriculum is developed instantiating this approach. It involves, among other things, memorization and recitation, imitation of spoken and written models, and spoken and written dialogical interaction involving introduction of increasingly sophisticated forms modeled upon current scientific models of English (as opposed to based on the folk models that most people learn in school and that are referenced in the Common Core State Standards). Even though such a curriculum would be based in very sound science–even though it would instantiate a lot of what we now know about language acquisition–the publisher would be able to develop it, market it, or get it adopted NEITHER under state department adoption guidelines NOR under the Common Core State Standards regime because it would DEVIATE MARKEDLY FROM BOTH.
This is just one example (I could supply many, many more), but it shows clearly how top-down authority KILLS important innovation, stops it cold.
Suppose that we are back at the beginning of the twentieth century, and a manufacturer wishes to introduce cars as an alternative to the horse but that there are state or national standards that require that any entity used for transportation receive a minimum amount of feed and water every day, have access to a paddock with minimum dimensions, be combed with curry combs on a regular schedule, etc. Same idea. The standards, based on notions about horses and donkeys, would preclude the innovation, the car, that the standard makers had not envisioned.
If teachers could make their own decisions about what materials they wish to purchase and use in their schools, then the innovative curriculum could be marketed directly to those teachers. The innovator (in this case, a small, independent educational publisher) could take the case for its approach directly to teachers in particular schools.
It’s time that teachers in individual schools be allowed, again, to make their own decisions about standards, curricula, pedagogical approaches, and assessment and evaluation of their students and of themselves. I would go even further and say that they should be put in charge of evaluating their administrators.
There is a wonderful story that Shelby Foote, the historian, tells about an African-American Union soldier, a former enslaved person, standing and watching captured Confederate prisoners being marched by. The former “slave” sees his former “master” among the prisoners and yells out, “Bottom rail on top this tim, huh, Massa.” : )
It’s time that the bottom rail were placed on top again and that power worked from the bottom up rather than the top down.
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Robert,
Could you clarify your usage of instantiate.
Thanks,
Duane
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“It’s time that teachers in individual schools be allowed, again, to make their own decisions about standards, curricula, pedagogical approaches, and assessment and evaluation of their students and of themselves. I would go even further and say that they should be put in charge of evaluating their administrators.”
Yes, Yes and a thousand more Yeses to the last sentence.
Administrative leaders, we don’t need no stinkin administrative leaders.
The principal should never make more than the highest paid teacher.
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It’s a mistake to try to come up with any sort of across-the-board consensus on standards because any such consensus will be backward looking and will stifle innovation based upon entirely different paradigms. For example, the CCSS in English language arts are formulated as a list of abstract skills rather than as a characterization of world knowledge (knowledge of what) and specific procedural knowledge (knowledge of how), and a strong case can be made that the CCSS in ELA are, therefore, wrong from the start, wrong at their most fundamental design level, that of their categorical conceptualization. To avoid making that sort of mistake and thus crushing innovation, standards need to be not mandatory and not across-the-board but voluntary and competing. In other words, we need not a single set of standards that everyone must follow but competing standards that people can borrow from or innovate upon as they wish.
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And it is perfectly possible to have local control by teachers AND to have protections of basic civil liberties–federal requirements that all students receive free education, that funding for their educations be equitable, that educational systems must be blind to race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, etc. One can have those sorts of protections without mandating standards, evaluation systems, etc., for all. It’s a canard to invoke the old states’-rights issues as an argument against teacher empowerment.
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I would say the main source of cloudiness in the debate is the fact that essentially nobody is interested in producing detailed, thoughtful, philosophically and pedagogically informed comparative analyses of standards themselves (including me) — at least in ELA.
Everyone just veers off into the meta-issue of their choice.
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How I would LOVE to have the time and funding to do precisely that! Alas!
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Tom,
Can you please give me an example of what you consider to be a “meta issue”? (at first I wrote meat instead of meta, maybe that is a better word?)
Thanks,
Duane
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Shortly before his death, Senator Robert Byrd stood on the floor of the Senate and held up a contemporary basal textbook. What he said about it, basically, was that it was an unreadable monstrosity, that it looked as though it had been designed by a committee of gerbils on methamphetamine. No wonder, he said, that our kids have short attention spans! Well, the monstrosities that are our current basal programs from the big publishers are creatures of the old state standards and adoption criteria regime. The criteria and standards metastasized to such an extent that it became IMPOSSIBLE to produce a clean, coherent text because of all the crap that one was REQUIRED to include.
And every one of those standards, every one of those adoption criteria, was well intentioned. Together, however, they made for textbook programs that instantiated no coherent pedagogical vision but a godawful mishmash of snippets and sound bites strung together with the sole purpose of showing that there was something on each page that met one of the thousands of predetermined requirements.
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I agree, however, that this is a GREAT piece by Camins. Extraordinarily thoughtful.
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Wonderful line from the Camins article:
Standards have become inextricably linked to highstakes assessments. This has superseded a deeper meaning of assessment- the daily cycle of
diagnosis and feedback to students that marks the practice of every effective teacher.
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From Camins:
““. . . learning goals (standards) . . . if conceived as broad values agreements about goals, standards might be a productive starting point for collaborative inquiry, innovation and evidence gathering … and ultimately play a key role in advancing student learning.”
At least Camins attempts to define “standards”, which he designates as “learning goals”. Then why not call them learning goals and get rid of the excessive cultural (mainly for profit business language) baggage that the concept of standards exude.
As per usual, my question/request: Someone please define “educational standard” so that all can agree upon what we mean to say when using that discourse.
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