State vs. local control of educational standards: Effects on teaching

State content standards and annual testing of one form or another have become a constant in virtually every state. This reality is expanding in many instances, due to the testing requirements of the 2001 No Child Left Behind legislation. As a result, the voice of the public school teacher in making decisions about what to teach and how to measure success becomes increasingly muted.

Most teachers are now on the receiving end of legislation that undercuts the very reasons they entered the profession-- to promote the joy of learning and thrill with excitement in its presence; to teach creatively, compassionately, and with personal style; and to experience the special satisfaction of discovering ways to be successful with even the most indifferent student. These are the intrinsic rewards that bring idealistic young people to teaching, and teachers in schools that value these qualities are able to experience these feelings throughout their careers. Yet they are not present when teaching must be narrowed to the fragments of learning on standardized tests, when teacher decision making is reduced to how best to raise test scores, and when judgments about teacher success are based primarily on these test scores. Nor are they present when a significant portion of a year's curriculum is devoted to teaching to state content standards, no matter how defensible these standards may be from the standpoint of discipline-based learning or preparation for college or the world of work.

If teaching is to attract and keep bright, compassionate, and idealistic young people, it must provide them with an environment rich in those attributes that characterize professional teaching. Schools must commit to the application of professional knowledge and creative skill in solving teaching and learning problems, to grappling constantly with the difficult questions of what to teach to whom and how to assess learning, and to the ongoing effort to understand young people well enough to make a difference in their lives as learners. Such schools are learning communities whose cultures support ongoing teacher development. Unless these attributes are present, teaching is reduced to the technocratic and rather mindless task of training students in an arbitrarily defined body of knowledge and skills that others-such as state departments of education-have determined all students should learn at least well enough to pass a standardized test. These decisions frequently are made with no regard for the students or what their learning needs may be at any given moment.

After collecting data over years of working with public and independent schools recognized for their excellence by state and national agencies, Heath (1994, 265) concluded, "Schools will not get better unless their adults are open to new ideas, encouraged to risk imaginatively and flexibly, implement their own ideas, provided time to care for individual students, spurred to enthusiastically infect them with the desire to learn, and expected to make mistakes about which they laugh and from which they learn." Heath argued that most teachers are still "called" to teaching for idealistic reasons and continue to see their profession as a noble one, despite other negative factors. As Heath (1994, 260) indicated, these factors include "politicians' expectations that they be only technicians raising students' test scores, parents' views that they are only hirelings to get their children into the best colleges or jobs, and media's caricatures of them as dunces sitting on stools on Newsweek covers." The qualities Heath outlined serve as a profile of how good teachers want to enact their professionalism; increasingly, however, this professionalism is being eroded by the pressures on schools to perform well on high-stakes standardized tests.

Top-down curriculum and assessment legislating sidesteps the important task of local educators, parents, and students considering the purposes of education in their community and the knowledge and skills they deem most important. This task is at the heart of the professional educator's work; when it is absent, schools forego their responsibility to address learning within the context of their students' lives. Teachers are no longer engaged in the critical professional task of determining how learning might best occur for their students given all they know about them as individuals situated in particular social, cultural, and ethnic contexts. Efforts to encourage school-based learning communities are undercut.

Also sacrificed is the commitment to give priority to the special talents that each teacher brings to the profession and to his or her school-perceptions about learning and children, enthusiasm for and eagerness to teach particular content, and the compelling qualities of personality. Teachers often have to set aside these qualities in favor of "joining the team," a form of what Hargreaves (1994, 195) has termed "contrived collegiality." So-called school improvement programs often are primarily concerned with finding how to improve student performance on state tests. In the process, teaching becomes depersonalized and standardized, and much of the idealism that was responsible for teachers choosing the profession is sacrificed. As long as state standards and tests dominate teachers' work, the hallmarks of teaching as a profession-indeed, a vocation-will sadly be diminished. Soon, many bright and idealistic young people attracted to teaching will look elsewhere for their professional fulfillment.