Opposite Intended Effect: A Case Study of How Over-Standardization Can Reduce Efficacy of Teacher Education, The

Teacher Education Quarterly, Summer 2004 by Hughes, Bob

First a caveat: The technology standards and their requirements are not, in and of themselves, "bad." It would be a mistake to view them as the evil hand of the state which mandates bad teaching or bad uses of technology. The primary flaw with standardization is what is missed or eliminated - and that is the case here. The technology standards inadequately require mandates as a replacement for addressing the underlying barriers to educational uses of technology, and this replacement shows the Achilles heel of the standards movement in all of its forms. There is a common mistake that the standards bearers repeat as an article of faith: If someone wants change, all that needs to be done is to demand that change and then measure if the change occurred. The case of teaching teachers to use technology as required by the SB 2042 mandates shows the fallacy of this. The standards do not address the underlying issues that are critical to the successful implementation of technologies issues that include the cognitive and affective readiness of children and teachers to use technology, challenges created by teachers' and their students' self-perceptions as technology users, and issues of access. Moreover, these standards make assumptions about the cultural neutrality of technology while they assume values that are often not fully proven. As Pacey (1994), Bowers (1988), and others have noted, the implementation of any technology, especially in education, exists within the cultural contexts that a technology is found. A standardization that does not allow for those multiple contexts will not be effective and will in its implementation create the opposite intended effect.

Schools and state systems cannot assume that there are no cultural biases in the technologies we choose to have teachers use. Nor should anyone assume that choices are made with none of the cultural biases of the people who create the standards. In addition to cultural biases, a mandate to implement or learn a specific technology means making choices about why it should be used and deciding what technologies should not be used. As Cuban (2001) and others have noted, these choices have historically led to a marketplace mentality where the technology in vogue is touted as the solution for the future. These evolving assumptions have, over the past 30 years, created educational technology industries that have made little impact on what occurs daily in classrooms.

When any educational activity is standardized throughout a state, the people making decisions on the standards must decide not only what is valuable, but what has less value. By requiring that teacher master certain skills, the impact of standardization is that other skills are de-emphasized. An ideal standardization would allow for the kinds of variance in practice that account for the ways in which local settings can adopt and adapt to the standards. However, that flexibility is rarely accomplished. In the standardization of teacher education in California represented by SB 2042, especially, the standards prescribe (in detail) a one-size-fits-all model of teacher preparation that reduces the elements of teacher preparation to definable skills. Therefore, the following analysis of the technology standards focuses on what the demands for standardization in teacher education misses. While presuming neutrality, the technology standards eliminate some skills and require others in ways that are inconsistent with the developmental needs of beginning teachers. In pursuing the gaps between what is required versus what exists, this analysis seeks to identify the impact that these gaps will have on teachers in programs like the one in which I work.