My friend and mentor, Don Orlich (professor emeritus at Washington State University) is a long-time warrior in the battle to save our local pubic schools from corporate takeover. He sent me this well researched paper on educational standards. We have condensed the article here, but you can obtain the full piece with citations by contacting us at ksdcitizens.org.
In My View
Educational Standards—Caveat Emptor
by Donald C. Orlich
Under pressure from the U.S. Department of Education and select private foundations, state officials have rushed to establish and enforce sets of standards for the K–12 public schools sector (e.g., Achieve, Inc.; Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation; Goals 2000; No Child Left Behind [NCLB] 2002; and Race to the Top [RTTT]). Thousands of pages of standards have been developed. The newest brief enthusiasm is the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). What follows is an analysis that stems from examining several standards from a sampling of states.
Technical Specifications for Learning
An assessment of the tone of writing in most sets of standards reveals inappropriate technical specifications being applied to human nature. Each published standard resembles a product specification. For example, most begin with a statement, “The student will ______” (just fill in the blank). Replace “student” with “battery,” and the specification might read: “The battery will light a three-watt bulb for two hours.”
Such technically oriented statements of student achievement omit the conditions under which the learning should occur and completely ignore the needed educational prerequisites and materials required to learn, e.g., the opportunity to learn variables. This dimension of the standards movement has plainly dehumanized much of the educational process. Students have simply become objects to be manipulated. This writer suggests reading Martin Buber (1970) in which he vividly illustrates how your actions toward fellow human beings show how you perceive them. If you view children, adolescents, or early adults only as objects rather than as humans to be nurtured, then schooling takes on a mechanistic dimension. Kozol (2005) shockingly illustrated how standards and high-stakes tests become more important than the cultivation of a child’s potential.
An unintentional result of not recognizing a dehumanizing factor is that schools are now, more than ever, considered assembly lines of knowledge. Students become products. Such industrial metaphors are inappropriate for delicate human services. Yet, these same technical specifications are praised as the means for reaching that frequently noted cliché—world-class standards.
My analyses of the massive sets of reform standards that have emerged in the United States revealed that none were based on empirical pilot-or-field-testing prior to implementation. The standards usually were constructed via a committee. In this sense, the standards are dogmatic pronouncements of what children in elementary, middle, and secondary schools should master.
Looking Critically at State Standards
State standards cover many topics, concepts, and subjects. Most appear to be randomly generated, even though several states’ documents explain that they are modeled after the many nationally published sets. The lengthy lists are not arranged in a meaningful sequence or hierarchical order. The standards collectively do not have flow charts or illustrate how a student or teacher progresses from one standard to another. Disturbingly, there is an implied 100/100 criterion for the standards: Every child must meet every standard. NCLB dictates that every child must pass a state test by 2013/2014. Ohanian’s (1999) analysis of this requirement was analyzed and succinctly stated in the title of her book—One Size Fits Few: The Folly of Educational Standards.
More importantly, the standards as prescribed do not have threads to link one to the next in any systematic sequence.
Enter the Recovery Act
On February 17, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act ([ARRA] 2009) was enacted with provisions to save and create jobs and lay the foundation for education reform. The Recovery Act allocated nearly $100 billion for education-related projects. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan designated $5 billion for competitive grants to states and school districts. Of the total, $4.35 billion was earmarked for the Race to the Top fund to improve education quality and results nationwide.
As with any federal program, there are evaluation criteria that must be met (Orlich 1979). Concerning the RTTT, Duncan mandated 19 “absolute” criteria” under six general categories that must be met by every state or school district that applied for funding: (1) State Success Factors; (2) Standards and Assessments; (3) Data Systems to Support Instruction; (4) Great Teachers and Leaders; (5) Turning around the Lowest-Achieving Schools; and (6) General Selection Criteria (U.S. Department of Education 2009).
Several years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court established parameters for federal spending. Among the criteria is: “Financial inducements of federal spending programs must not be coercive” (Ryan 2004, 62). Of critical importance, the RTTT required even higher-stakes tests for students, costly accountability systems, and the implementation of charter schools where none exist. The money is not focused on helping classroom teachers do a better job. No, the RTTT is a further attempt to privatize the public schools using the public funding. This legislation is a direct attack on the U.S. Tenth Amendment—state’s rights.
Introduction to the Common Core State Standards
On June 2, the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) presented K–12 Common Core State Standards documents (2009). These standards were produced for 48 states, 2 territories, and the District of Columbia. These English language arts and mathematics standards represent a set of expectations for student knowledge and skills that high school graduates need to master to “succeed in college” and careers.
The criteria used to develop the college- and career-readiness standards, as well as the K–12 standards were (NGA Center and CCSSO 2009, Introduction):
• Aligned with college and work expectations;
• Include rigorous content and application of knowledge through high-order skills;
• Built upon strengths and lessons of current state standards;
• Informed by top-performing countries, so that all students are prepared to succeed in our global economy and society; and,
• Evidence and/or research-based.
Orlich goes on to illustrate the developmental and cognitive difficulties with the use of standards to guide the curriculum. He concludes with: “No reform group in this nation used any empirically based, theoretical model to design its program—save the Tennessee STAR project for small class size (Mosteller 1995; Nye, Hedges, and Konstantopoulos 1999). Virtually all federal- and state-sponsored standards movements simply have become the planet’s most expensive, resource-wasting, intuitively designed trial-and-error experiments.”
“Not to be a polemic, but the question to be raised is, ‘Why do standards writing teams ignore the NAEP data to reflect grade-level appropriateness?’ Using developmental psychology, educators can reasonably predict which standards of achievement children in the schools can reach.”
“In closing, my plea is to educators at all levels and education policy makers to re-examine their respective standards and apply each to the appropriate developmental and cognitive levels. We owe it to the children to offer them achievable standards. The children of this nation need more than intuitively generated standards to achieve Lewis Carroll’s (2000) “best of educations.’”
Professor Orlich’s article hits on a common theme in our resistance to this juggernaut of absurdity called educational reform. A very powerful plutocratic synod is trying to turn wildly subjective human beings into mild and benign objective fodder to keep our/their economy rolling along.
Are we not a capitalistic society? Where is capitalism in all of this? Does not capitalism require creativity? Where is creativity in the curriculum and in the rubrics for measuring growth and achievement? Are we not a two-party representative democracy? Where is the curriculum and the rubric for determining a student’s ability to discriminate between what is reasonalble and fallacious? True and false? Ethical and unethical? Beautiful and ugly?
Our capitalist democracy was designed by our founding fathers to allow the individual citizen to experience the full range of his or her potential. This potential is currently being negated by elite corporate capitalists and obsequious politicians who are suffering from severe cases of ignorance and Potomac Fever.
What the corporate leaders know and don’t care about and the politicans don’t know and therefore also don’t care about is the simple fact that educating a child is a very subjective process.
I teach a class at Kennewick High for our International Baccaulaureate program called Theory of Knowledge. This is an epistimology class, a class that explores the nature of knowledge, history of knowledge, growth of knowledge, etc. The class teaches that we can know what we know through four basic channels, or what we call ways of knowing: our sensory perception, language, reason, and emotion. In our curriculum there is also a ring of knowledge areas around this core. This outer ring consists of math, natural sciences, human sciences, aesthetics (this includes music, dance, painting, literature, sculpture, etc.), ethics, history, philosophy, and religion.
In this schema there is a foundational assumption, and it is that some knowledge and understanding of all these components is requisite for a human being to become fully functioning, or as Abraham Maslow would have said, “self-actualized.”
The current trends in education are systematically expunging the aesthetic, philosophical, religious, social science, and ethical components of traditional curriculum from our public schools. As Theodore Sizer states in his book, The Red Pencil, our schools have become a Procrustean bed where our students are stretched or chopped off in order to fit this bed’s inexorable pedagogical dimensions.
For any teacher of conscience, this becomes highly problematic because it not only excludes and negates requisite dimensions of a child’s education like ethics and emotion, but it also causes a teacher to suffer a certain degree of abnegation. We work each day painfully aware that we are not giving our kids the very best we have to offer when we treat education objectively–as data on a bar graph.
I understand that this whole “objective” and “subjective” talk is a bit vague, so let me give some concrete examples of what I am talking about.
Objective: Student identifies central conflict in Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men.”
Subjective: Student understands the novel well enough to cry at the end and begin to ask serious questions about the humanity of George’s decision to shoot his friend. Student feels a strong compulsion to write an essay defending or attacking George’s decision.
Objective: Student knows a2+b2=c2 and how to apply.
Subjective: Student knows the formula, how to apply, but also goes on to ask if there are relationships between geometry and our perception of reality. Would this same formula be true in the other dimensions scientists are now promising exist?
Objective: Student can identify and quantify 10 elements in a soil test.
Subjective: Students can identify and quantify 10 elements in a soil test, but they also note the quality of the soil microbial activity and its impact on those elemental quantities. A really astute student might even wonder if the interplay of chemistry and biology in soils is in any way analogous to human physiology.
It is worth noting that in each of these cases the very best of what is educational falls in the subjective category, and all of it is completely absent from the current menu of educational reform. How would a politician or corporate leader put any of these subjective scenarios on a tidy little bar graph? The answer is they can’t, so they settle instead for measurable mediocrity.
And the band plays on.