New Zealand is one of the few—perhaps the only—nation that abandoned national standards.
As Professor Martin Thrupp Explains here, scholars and researchers helped to expose the flaws of national standards.
The national standards were driven by political, not educational, purposes. The ruling party pushed them and couldn’t stop pushing them, ignoring all criticism.
Thrupp’s book, co-edited with Bob Lingard, Meg Maguire, and David Hursh, “The Search for Better Educational Standards: A Cautionary Tale” teaches us that concerted efforts by educators, scholars, and parents can roll back ruinous education policy.
He writes:
“The National-led Government had become fully invested in the National Standards policy. When it was first announced in 2007, it was National’s big idea for education – the ‘cornerstone’ of its education policy. Over the 10 years that followed, the Government had dismissed all criticisms. Any late turning back would be a sign of weakness, and instead the National party wanted to plough on with this truly awful project that had already became a world-class example of how not to make education policy….
“Despite the National-led Government’s adherence to the National Standards, researchers and academics certainly pushed back against the policy…In fact, researchers and academics did a great deal in this space! A particular highlight for me was the 2012 open letter signed by over 100 education academics against the public release of the National Standards data. But there were countless other instances of academics and researchers opposing the National Standards, either publicly or more behind the scenes. Opinion pieces, articles, TV debates, radio, public meetings, meetings behind closed doors – and all the rest of it. Chapter 8 of A Cautionary Tale, about the politics of research, gives numerous examples.
“A number of us also did empirical research that helped to explain how the National Standards were a problem (see A Cautionary Tale, especially chapters 3, 5 and 7). And, of course, New Zealand researchers are part of international networks that are working on the same concerns about high-stakes assessment in other countries (see A Cautionary Tale, especially chapters 2 and 10). Note to Cullen: without doubt, some of the best work in this area is coming from Australian academics.
“It is true that some researchers and academics chose to support the National-led Government’s National Standards policies (A Cautionary Tale, chapter 8). This happened for various reasons that may have included the researchers’ educational views, their political beliefs, the political pressures that were upon them or their organisations, and the advantages that came with supporting the policy. It may have also involved a judgement that it was better to be ‘inside the tent’ and have influence than be on the outside.
“But this range of viewpoints among researchers and academics is no different than was seen within the teaching profession and amongst principals, where National Standards also had supporters. Indeed, a central problem that the new Labour-led Government will have to grapple with, having removed the National Standards policy, is doing away with the data-driven disposition amongst teachers and principals that grew along with the policy under the previous Government.
“Looking ahead
“Even though most teachers and principals did not like the impact of the National Standards policy, after a decade of its influence New Zealand primary schools are now marinated in the thinking, language, and expectations of the National Standards. This has also had wider impacts, for instance on early childhood education. It will all take a little while to undo.
“It’s great, though, that New Zealand primary schools will now be able to spend less time shoring up judgements about children – judgements that have often been pointless or harmful – and instead spend more time making learning relevant and interesting for each child. Removing National Standards should also allow teachers to be less burdened, contributing to making teaching a more attractive career again.”
Education deformers love asking, “What’s your alternative to standards and testing?” They expect stone-cold silence in response. Sorry to disappoint. Here’s an alternative to top-down, invariant, inflexible, mandatory, amateurish “standards” like those foisted on the country with no vetting whatsoever:
in place of the grade-by-grade bullet list, a few general guidelines (a very broad framework–perhaps four or five principles), continually revisited and critiqued, that provide the degrees of freedom within which real curricular and pedagogical innovation can occur
and
open-source crowd sourcing of alternative, innovative ideas. In other words, we could have
Competing, voluntary standards, frameworks, learning progressions, curriculum outlines, reading lists, pedagogical approaches, lesson templates, etc., for particular domains,
posted by scholars, researcher, curriculum developers, and teachers to an open national portal or wiki, and subjected to ongoing, vigorous, public debate and refinement based on results in the classroom and ongoing research and development, freely adopted by autonomous local schools and districts and subjected to continual critique by teacher-led schools–teachers who are given the time in their schedules to subject those, and their own practice, to ongoing critique via something like Japanese Lesson Study.
General Objections to Standardization
Albert_Einstein_Head“I believe in standardizing automobiles. I do not believe in standardizing human beings. Standardization is a great peril which threatens American culture.”
— Albert Einstein, Saturday Evening Post interview, 10/26/1929
“There’s no bullet list like Stalin’s bullet list.”
—Edward Tufte, “The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint”
What strikes me most, reading through the CC$$ in ELA, is how mind-numbingly unimaginative, hackneyed, received, and pedestrian they are. They are Common in the sense of being base and vulgar. The last thing we need is a forced march along a path of mediocrity.
What follows is a list of general objections to the whole idea of a single, invariant, top-down set of national standards and summative tests. Each could itself be a suitable topic for a book-length work. If you haven’t the patience to read through this entire list, please skip to the last two, which summarize extremely important objections to the general approach taken in the CCSS for ELA.
The CC$$ in ELA seem to have been written by amateurs with no knowledge of the sciences of language acquisition and little familiarity with best practices in the various domains that the standards cover. Achieve would have got similar results if it had handed David Coleman copies of Galen and of the 1858 edition of Gray’s Anatomy and sent him to a cabin in Vermont to write new “standards” for the medical profession.
The CC$$ in Math barely tweak a long-existing consensus about the progression and approach to mathematics education, one that leaves most adult products of that education, a few years after they’ve happily put it behind them, basically innumerate and fine with that. (The preceding state standards were almost all based on the NCTM standards and so were remarkably similar.) Furthermore, the grade-by-grade math standards are forcing math teachers, all over the country, to teach and test whatever the standards [sic] say for that grade level, even when their students haven’t, at all, the necessary background for this study. So, for example, if you are a junior, you’re doing precalc, period, even if you can’t add and subtract fractions.
Having national standards creates economies of scale that educational materials monopolists can exploit, enabling them to crowd out/keep out smaller competitors. This is a HUGE issue with the new national “standards” that has received almost no attention. There’s a reason why the education materials monopolists kicked in a lot of money to create these “standards.”
Kids differ. Standards do not.
Standards are treated by publishers AS the curriculum and imply particular pedagogical approaches, and so they result in DRAMATIC distortions of curricula and pedagogy. Every publisher in the country–God help us–is now beginning every project in ELA by making a spreadsheet with the amateurish CC$$ in one column and the places in their program where these are “covered” in the next. So much for curricular coherence.
Innovation in educational approaches comes about from the implementation of competing ideas; creating one set of standards ossifies; it PRECLUDES potentially extraordinarily valuable innovation.
Ten years of doing this standards-and-testing stuff under NCLB hasn’t worked. It’s idiotic to do more of what hasn’t worked and to expect real change/improvement.
In a free society, no unelected group (the CCSSO) has the right to overrule every teacher, curriculum coordinator, and curriculum developer with regard to what the outcomes of educational processes should be.
High-stakes tests lead to teaching to the test–for example, to having kids do lots and lots of practice using the test formats–and all this test prep has significant opportunity costs; it crowds out important learning.
A complex, diverse, pluralistic society needs kids to be variously trained, not identically milled.
The folks who prepared these standards did their work heedlessly; they did not stop to question what a standard should look like in a particular domain but simply made unwarranted but extremely consequential decisions about that based on current practice in state standards that were themselves the product of lowest-common-denominator educratic groupthink.
The tests and test prep create enormous test anxiety and undermine the development of love of learning.
Real learning tends to be unique and unpredictable. It can’t be summarized in a bullet list. The last thing that we need is this Powerpointing of U.S. K-12 education.
We are living in times of enormous change; kids being born today are going to experience more change in their lifetimes than has occurred in all of human history up to this point, so they need to be intrinsically, not extrinsically, motivated to learn; high-stakes tests belong to a nineteenth-century and older extrinsic punishment/reward school of educational theory and fly in the face of the prime directives of the educator: to identify the unique gifts of unique kids, to build upon those, and so to assist in the creation of intrinsically motivated, independent, life-long learners.
If we create a centralized Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth, that is a first step on a VERY slippery slope. Have we come to the point in the United States where we are comfortable with legislating ideas?
The standards-and-testing regime usurps local teacher and administrator autonomy, and no one works well, at all well, under conditions of low autonomy.
The standards and the new tests, though not tested before they were foisted on the public, and been testing in practice, and they have failed. Abjectly. The standards and testing regime has done NOTHING to increase outcomes as otherwise measured.
The standards and the new test formats, though extremely consequential in their effects on every aspect of K-12 schooling, were never subjected to national debate, nor were they subjected to the equivalent of failure modes and effects analysis.
The legislation that created the Department of Education specifically forbade it from getting involved in curricula, but as E. D. Hirsch, Jr., pointed out on this blog a few weeks ago, the new math standards clearly ARE a curriculum outline, and the USDE has forced this curriculum outline on the country. And, of course, the ELA standards are being treated as though this skill list were the curriculum.
No mechanism exists for ongoing critique and revision of these standards by scholars, researchers, and practitioners.
The new tests—PARCC (spell that backward), not-Smart imBalanced, and AIRy nothing (collectively, the Common Core College and Career Ready Assessment Program, or C.C.R.A.P.) are just awful. And they have increased rather than decreased the gender and racial gaps in outcomes.
The ELA standards are a bullet list of abstractly formulated skills that barely touches upon knowledge of what (world knowledge) and that treats procedural knowledge (knowledge of how) so vaguely–without operationalization–that valid assessment based on the standards as written is impossible. I heartily approve of some of the general guidelines that surround these standards–read substantive, related texts closely–but I disapprove of the narrow New Critical emphasis of the standards generally (texts exist in context) and of the general formulation of the CCSSO bullet list as descriptions of abstract skills.
The creators of these standards did not seem to understand that much learning in ELA is not learning at all but acquisition–is not acquired by explicit means. ALMOST NONE of the vocabulary and grammar that a person commands was learned via explicit teaching of that vocabulary and grammar. It’s extremely important that English teachers understand this and understand how, in fact, grammar and vocabulary are acquired so that they can create the circumstances wherein this acquisition can happen, and they are not going to begin to do that based on this bullet list, which, in its treatment of acquisition of linguistic competence, can most charitably be described as prescientific–as instantiating discredited mythologies or folk theories on which it is counterproductive to build curricula and pedagogy. In their instantiation of prescientific, folk theories of language acquisition, the new “standards” are rather like having new standards for the U.S. Navy that warn of the possibility of sailing off the edge of the world.
“In a free society, no unelected group (the CCSSO) has the right to overrule every teacher, curriculum coordinator, and curriculum developer with regard to what the outcomes of educational processes should be.”
hahahahahahahahahahahh
yeah. in a free society. Not exactly funny the extent to which that is not so, alas. No accident that the “Land of the Free” incarcerates a higher percentage of its citizens than does any other country on the globe with the exception of the island nation of the Seychelles. So many new economic, political, social, and technological means of command and control now in the hands of the masters of the New Feudal Order. Why worry about all that when one can go to see the new IMAX 4D version of Scream 14?
You mention several good points. The “economies of scale” has rarely been discussed. Gates has been the main puppet master behind the CCSS. He is also now pitching depersonalized learning, which is another backdoor to standardizing education. It is no accident that all of this so-called education can be conveniently formatted so that a computer provides the so-called education. It is all a gigantic pay to play scheme to sell products and students’ personal data.
New Zealand still has the wisdom to listen to its experts in education. In our country, legitimate education experts have been marginalized, and attempts have been made to drown out the voices of reason. Our nation has a boat load of billionaires and MBAs lining up to take advantage of our “free public money,” and most of our politicians are Milton Friedman clones. The only chance we have is to get large numbers of the public to rise up against the madness of privatization.
Now, anyone who has taken a seminar on “data-driven instruction” is an InstaEduPundit.
As usual well stated Robert! Concur with most of what you have written but with a few caveats-LOL.
“Competing, voluntary standards, frameworks, learning progressions, curriculum outlines, reading lists, pedagogical approaches, lesson templates, etc. . . . ”
I wouldn’t use the term “standards” at all as standard implies that the teaching and learning process can be either measured or somehow rated against said standards. And that thought is ludicrous and risible. To understand why see Ch. 6 “Of Standards and Measurement” of my book “Infidelity to Truth: Education Malpractices in American Public Education”.
“We are living in times of enormous change; kids being born today are going to experience more change in their lifetimes than has occurred in all of human history up to this point. . . ”
I can’t agree with that thought. My parents or grandparents probably lived through the period of most change in human history-the 20th century. I do not believe the “ultimate change” mantra as it is used as it implies the need for extravagant radical change. We’ve had enough extravagant radical change with all the edudeformer malpractices of this century.
“Real learning tends to be unique and unpredictable. It can’t be summarized in a bullet list.”
Exactly! I’ve always stated that learning, whether in music, arts, academics and/or sports is more quantum than it is linear and/or geometric. Learning does not follow a prescribed path and timeframe.
Senor Swacker, you ain’t seen nothing’ yet. The world of 2030 will be unrecognizable from the POV of 2017.
The only reason it will be unrecognizable for me is because I’ll probably be dead by then.
By the by, why do you think it will be unrecognizable? What will make it so?
OMG. I am about three quarters of the way through a book I’m writing on this topic. That’s a long one. Trend analysis. The world will change more in the next 40 years than in all of previous human history.
I just can’t agree with your analysis on this one, Bob.
What’s that old saying “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”
no. everything changes, very, very soon
Been hearing that most of my 62 years on this planet. And that aphorism has held true from all I can tell.
lol as you wish
Let us know when the book comes out.
“We are living in times of enormous change; kids being born today are going to experience more change in their lifetimes than has occurred in all of human history up to this point, so they need to be intrinsically, not extrinsically, motivated to learn; high-stakes tests belong to a nineteenth-century and older extrinsic punishment/reward school of educational theory and fly in the face of the prime directives of the educator: to identify the unique gifts of unique kids, to build upon those, and so to assist in the creation of intrinsically motivated, independent, life-long learners.”
That’s part of our mission. The other part is to help raise kids who will be positive contributors to their communities and participants in the creation and maintenance of a democratic society. These are obviously not mutually exclusive goals but equally important to a healthy society. This rapid change in society seems to be leading to a fracturing of traditional institutions with a faux focus on the wants and needs of individuals rather than those of sound communities. I guess what we need is intrinsically motivated people who can think creatively and critically beyond their own (immediate) needs for the betterment of society as a whole. I hope these tasks are not left to schools alone.
Not sure what I am trying to say. Maybe you can figure it out. 🙂
oh yes yes yes. beautifully said!
“to help raise kids who will be positive contributors to their communities and participants in the creation and maintenance of a democratic society”. This is a teaching task which increases in difficulty as democracy is undermined by (a) ability of big-$ interests to [legally] buy legislation/ policy, & (b)the fragmentation/ disappearance/ privatization of public goods.
Not saying it’s impossible, but innovative thinking will be reqd. (a) is not lost on hisch-age students who can become prematurely cynical & disengaged just following the national news. They need to be engaged in the small, the local, the grass-roots to experience that individuals can combine forces & affect outcomes. (b) can be very tough in lower-income areas as local pubschs, libraries, small museums are closed, public parks not maintained, etc; how to avoid the sense that society is not taking care of its members & how to organize & push back thro repr democracy.
“Having national standards creates economies of scale that educational materials monopolists can exploit, enabling them to crowd out/keep out smaller competitors. This is a HUGE issue with the new national “standards” that has received almost no attention. There’s a reason why the education materials monopolists kicked in a lot of money to create these “standards.”
Yes, that is the primary reason behind Common Core.
Gates understands all about this, since this is the bidness of Microsoft — exploiting the economy of scale and their monopolistic position to either crush the competition or simply buy them out.
Companies like Microsoft and Pearson have no interest in producing a different custom software version for each of the thousands of school districts.
They want one version for thousands of districts that they can just plug into, thereby taking advantage of the economy of scale.
They also do not want a constantly moving target, but a set of standards that is hard to change and can only be changed across the board by a single entity, effectively controlled by the very companies that stand to profit most. Hence the copyright on Common Core by a private company.
These things were all planned by Gates. Arne Duncan certainly did not have the understanding of how this stuff works to come up with such a coherent plan.
This was the whole reason from the start–national standards, national tests, one national database of student responses serving as the gatekeeper for curricula. Ugly as hell. Really ugly, insidious, evil
Best line: standards are created be publishers to maximize profits!
“…forcing math teachers, all over the country, to teach and test whatever the standards [sic] say for that grade level, even when their students haven’t, at all, the necessary background for this study.”
You have hit the nail squarely. I taught such a student, caught in the “diploma project” of a decade ago, whose lack of understanding of basic math kept her out of LPN school. I am ashamed that I was complicit in our failure to make sure she had what she needed.
I used to spend hours teaching students to read the standard ruler. Just a week ago, an old student of mine complained to me that the kids he hired to do basic carpentry had to be taught to read a ruler, and that it was a difficult task.
Teachers are aware of where their students are and how much they are willing to progress. Occasional heroes are celebrated who seem to achieve beyond any of the rest of us. But that is better than penalizing collectively a great number of students who do not fit our clean and neat grade level idea.
Nice, Roy. Thanks for sharing. Ridiculous what we are doing. We are forcing math teachers to try to build houses out of materials that aren’t yet oaks but still acorns.
From the article:
““The analysis seems to demonstrate that instead of evidence-informed policy what we have here is more a case of policy-based evidence, with the political in the National Standards very much overriding research evidence and professional knowledges, to the detriment of the reform”. ”
Sounds very familiar, eh!
This is really sad:
“In a move to radically upend Michigan’s governance over schools, Republican lawmakers are seeking to eliminate the elected state board of education. While many believe it’s unlikely the legislation will pass, both its authors and detractors agree that some action is necessary to arrest an alarming decline in local academic performance.”
Michigan public schools are tanking. Michigan has been an ed reform state since 1993, with Engler. They’re destroying public education there.
But it doesn’t matter. The ed reform response to the disaster they created in Michigan?
Get rid of the elected state school board!
They are absolutely hammering the Great Lakes states. Our public education systems get worse every year under ed reform leadership and it doesn’t stop. Every failure is rewarded with another round of privatization, gimmicks, and fads. The real and lasting damage of ed reform will be centered in Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, Illinois and Pennsylvania. This is where they’ve done the most damage.
They focus on DC, Boston and NYC for a reason- their track record here is appalling.
I thought Michigan was a Blue state. Blaming a political party obfuscates the real drivers: MONEY!
Michigan used to be a blue state.
Republican Rick Snyder is governor. The legislature is controlled by Republicans
Can someone in ed reform explain how Michigan and Ohio public school systems drop in ranking every year under ed reform governance?
Every. Single. Year. Michigan is now ranked at the bottom. They did this. They’re actively destroying strong public schools and replacing them with cheap gimmicks and garbage.
Boy, DeVos should be proud! She’s tanking the public education system she didn’t build and doesn’t support. She creates nothing. All she does is dismantle.
https://www.the74million.org/article/michigan-gop-fights-to-eliminate-state-board-of-education-as-scores-plummet-highlighting-broader-debate-over-school-oversight/
How DID the Great Lakes states end up with all the ed reform garbage? Why did we get stuck with their cheap for-profit schemes and dumb experiments?
Is it because we’re not as important as DC, Boston or NYC? They felt free to run these free market experiments in “the rust belt” in a way they didn’t in the high value cities on the east coast?
Are they PROUD that Ohio and Michigan are tanking in national rankings? Is this good work they;ve done here?
None of them live here. Is that why they felt free to “reinvent” our schools?
Anything can either be done well or done poorly. The current usagae of standards is an example of poorly. In science, an intelligent system of what topics need to be covered makes sense. If the necessary material is not covered in Algebra one, then the student will not be able to manage Algebra two. Topics such as evolution need appropriate standards. Try getting into medical school if you went to a school that taught “intelligent design”.
“Topics such as evolution need appropriate standards.”
No they don’t need standards. What is needed is decent agreed upon by the teachers curriculum and the following of that curriculum by the teachers.
My question to you Chris: “How the hell did this country survive without educational “standards” before that term came into vogue?”
All teachers need is a one page
“scope and sequence” for any given course.
And even the sequencing should have flexibility
For example,
Biology:
-5 Kingdoms (Classification)
-Bio-diversity
-Cells
-Genetics
-Life processes (Photosynthesis/Respiration; Reproduction)
-Ecology/Ecosystems
-Natural selection/evolution
-Human body systems
Now let the professional educator do their job!
¡Exacto!
If you believe in intelligent design you don’t belong anywhere near a medical school.
I am good friends with the father of one field of cancer research at one of the top research and treatment centers in the world. A few years ago, when I asked him if he could accept a fellow who had graduated from either Liberty (Falwell) or Regent (Robertson) universities, he said, “no, because they fundamentally do not understand the scientific method.”
The debate on Common Core and a general standards-based approach to math and ELA instruction should be over. A similar debate about the value of standardized test scores should be over as well. The evidence of abject FAILURE is definitive. All 50 million students, K to 12 have experienced nothing but. Ask any experienced teacher if the end result of this multi-billion dollar fiasco has produced a palpably “better” student. More knowledgeable, more skilled, better thinkers or problem solvers, more curious, and better prepared for their futures. Even by their own twisted, invalid, and unreliable metric – test scores – the standards-based, test-and-punish, know-nothing reform crowd and their political sycophants have failed miserably.
And yet we see this same failed philosophy pushing the Next Generation Science Standards into tens of thousands of classrooms across the country. Common Core 2.0 brought us by the self-proclaimed experts at Achieve. Developmentally inappropriate, performance-based standards that confuse the way seriously trained professional scientists “do science” with the best ways that children “learn science”. Yet another attempt to de-emphasize the importance of subject knowledge in favor of vague and empty thinking skills. Another attempt to re-visit the failed pedagogy of constructivism and discovery learning; a false belief in facilitating (not teaching) while failing to understand the importance of the science sage on the sage. NGSS is putting the cart before the horse while putting the horse out to pasture, an approach that will damage a generation of science students – all in the name of bad standards while ignoring past failures.
Like!
NGSS also continues the movement toward chemistry and physics at the expense of natural history, which everybody will experience. One is tempted to look for a conspiracy on the part of industrial technocrats, who would rather a population not know when a species goes into extinction.
“… without doubt, some of the best work in this area is coming from Australian academics.”
So why do should NZ get the benefits and not us?!? Bloody Kiwis “bludging” off us yet again! 🙂
David,
The voters in NZ turned out the rascals. In AUS and US, we continue to elect them.
Well, Australia stole all of our great ideas about reforming schools (including Teach for Australia)
Bloody Aussies bludging off us yet again. (I have no idea what that means, but it sure sounds good)
bludge (blʌdʒ)
vb
1. (when: intr, often foll by on) to scrounge from (someone)
2. (intr) to evade work
3. (intr) archaic to act as a pimp
““… without doubt, THE best work in this area is coming from an Australian academic-Noel Wilson and his “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error”.”
I think Diane needs to create a new category for her posts: “New Zealand”. That’s two articles in two days!