A reader added this insight into the debate about standards and which body of knowledge gets sanctified as “national standards” that everyone should know:

 

I have made this comment before, but no domain of knowledge is neutral. Some group has to identify, categorize, organize, and interpret a discipline, a subject, a standard (although the term standard is a foreign concept in academia). What is different from the authoring of standards and what occurs in professional communities is in the latter there is purposeful process of evaluating what theories, ideas, facts, practices are accepted within the community. Using various methodologies particular to each discipline, academics will debate at length in journals, papers, conferences, what knowledge is of most worth — and of course, as Thomas Kuhn has pointed out, as a disciplinary domain proceeds, there will be paradigm shifts where entire foundations of a discipline will be discarded a newer ones adopted and the process continues. The disturbing nature of the accountability regime has been the belief and enactment of the concept of standards or a common bodies of knowledge that everyone should know and that legislatures and their chosen panels of “experts” have a god’s eye view of what that knowledge should be. Although we have always had this type of imposition from textbook companies, when I started teaching in the 60′s we were given wide latitude in the selection, organization, and interpretation of knowledge — which reflected what our academic communities had taught us was important and worth teaching. The standards movement has delegitimized the knowledge they are proposing by removing from its development any process of evaluating the worth of that knowledge. Because they are not academics, they do not understand that merely stating and testing are not sources of legitimization — they are sources of power, but not verifications of claims of the worth of knowledge. As some of these blogs have pointed out, we now find ourselves in a post-modern critique of knowledge — who is in power gets to privilege some body of knowledge and award credentials based on the acquisition of that privileged knowledge — irrespective of whether that knowledge is supported by any disciplinary verifications of knowledge worth.