Take back the standards: a modest proposal for a quiet revolution

Leadership, Jan-Feb, 2003 by Douglas B. Reeves

Leadership magazine invited standards proponent Douglas B. Reeves, Chairman of the Center for Performance Assessment, and skeptic Ron Brandt, Executive Editor Emeritus for the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, to offer their views on standards based education in the dialogue on the following pages.

The criticisms of academic standards are well established. Some states have established standards that are too voluminous, too specific, not specific enough, and most of all, linked to the tests that critics love to hate.

Teachers and administrators alike spontaneously offer as established truth that the standards movement is responsible for the destruction of creativity in the classroom, a regimen of "drill and kill" throughout the land, and the transformation of formerly good educators into automations. By such logic, one must be a bad teacher in order to have good test scores, and good teachers are doomed to produce low test scores.

Presented in such stark terms, the choice appears to be that we either enter a brave new world of standards that would make Huxley blush or join the clarion call to "just leave me alone and let me teach!"

There is another alternative. By taking back the standards, educators and school leaders can acknowledge the weaknesses of standards in their present form and, at the same time, remain committed to the fundamental principles that separate standards-based education from the bell curve.

Why standards? The forgotten argument

In the widely published criticisms of standards, the implication is that the alternative is educational Nirvana, in which blissful children are guided by teachers who intuitively know the most important academic content, respond to their individual needs, and prepare students for the next level of instruction--a level where, presumably, teachers are also pursuing their own idea of what is most important for students to learn.

Whatever the flaws of standards, let us remember that the alternative is not perfection. To put a fine point on it, there are only two ways to evaluate student performance. We can either compare students to an objective and clear standard, of we can compare students to each other.

The former alternative, however imperfect, provides a consistent basis for assessment and a rational foundation for curriculum. Without standards, teachers and administrators compare students to one another and thereby institutionalize the bell curve. That brings us back to a world of bluebirds, robins and black birds, the choices of color hardly coincidental.

It's not as bad as all that--it's worse. In the absence of academic standards, the world of the bell curve has a doubly pernicious impact. Students in a disadvantaged environment are assured that they are doing just fine, even if their literacy skills are insufficient to provide opportunities in the future.

"They're just doing the best they can," I am assured, "considering where they came from." Meanwhile, advantaged students receive challenges and opportunities that are systematically denied to children of poverty and children of color.

Standards, by contrast, create a level playing field in which expectations are consistent. While we can argue about whether or not fifth grade students should be able to write a five-paragraph essay, draw a two-dimensional scale model or understand the relationship of consumer choices and environmental impact, at the very least we can agree that these expectations should not vary based on the color of the child's skin or the bottom line of the parent's tax return.

When the same children are playing on the playground or football field, we demand consistency and fairness. We should expect no less in the academic classroom. Thus at the very core of the standards movement is a desire for fairness--the same expectations for all students. Has the execution of that ideal been perfect? Hardly. But improvement is a better alternative than abandonment.

Essential reforms: How to take back the standards

At this writing, standards have been established in all 50 states, either at the state or district level. That represents substantial progress from a decade ago, in which the dogma of "local control" was frequently a code word for those school systems that wished to preserve the ability to expect less of some children based on their economic status or ethnic identity. Nevertheless, standards in their present form can be improved by three reforms.

First, change from one-shot testing to multiple assessments. While it is true that the nation is over-tested, we are under-assessed. The distinction is clear. Testing provides an end-of-year evaluation, with feedback delivered too late for use in the classroom. Assessment, by contrast, can be provided at the school and classroom level throughout the year, accompanied by immedilate feedback and accompanying improvements in teaching and learning.

There is not a syllable in the new federal legislation, No Child Left Behind, that requites states to enrich corporate test developers. Rather, each state may develop its own testing system.