Standards: Why Does Anyone Bother?

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October 20, 2009

Standards: Why Does Anyone Bother?

by Alexander Hoffman, at 10:43 am

For the last two weeks, I’ve been raising objections to the idea that new standards — particularly new national standards — are worth the attention they get. It is ridiculous to think that they can be a meaningful lever of broad educational improvement. In fact, I do not think that they can have any significant impact at all.

Why Does Anyone Bother?

Hamlet spoke of customs “More honor’d in the breach than the observance.” I would not go quite that far when speaking of standards in education, but that is primarily because standards are in large part based on what is already actually done. To the extent that they are descriptive, standards are honored. But to the extent that they are prescriptive, they are rather impotent.

So, why all this attention to standards? Why is anyone bothering, and why does anyone pay attention?

President Kennedy said of the Apollo program,

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not only because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

I wish that we could say the same of our high publicity efforts in education, that we do them not because they are easy. But I know that it is not true. Politicians and public leaders want to do something, and probably want to be seen as doing something, so they do what they can, even if what they can do is worthless. Putting together a group to revise standards, or toughen them up, is not that hard. Even getting fifty governors and chief state school officers to agree to adopt/adopt voluntary national standards before they are published is not very hard. It is certainly easier than actually improving educational practices in thousands of schools and millions of classrooms.

Abraham Maslow observed that if all you have is a hammer, than every problem looks like a nail. I suppose that to people at the top who know that their time is limited, top down solutions that can be rolled out quickly look like a good idea. That has got to be part of it — though the problem is bigger than that, as it is not just people at the top (e.g. governors) who believe that these kinds of efforts matter. Yet it is really hard to believe that anyone who has invested serious time in thinking about children or how their schooling actually works could think that new national standards are going to make a difference.

http://www.edpolicythoughts.com Corey

Alexander,

I agree with most of what you’ve written, but I still think that standards are worth a little bit of time and effort, for four reasons:

1.) They allow distant governments the right level of control
2.) Students should have some common experiences in school
3.) National standards are the only hope for NCLB-like accountability
4.) They’re the most practical solution to the problem

More here: http://www.edpolicythoughts.com/2009/10/standards-why-anyone-should-bother.html
http://MoreThoughtful.blogspot.com Alexander Hoffman

Corey,

Thanks for reading, and for responding so completely on your own blog.

I’d like to say, however, that I do not think that yo are addressing the same issue that I am. That is, you are addressing the impact that you would LIKE standards to have. I am addressing the impact that they DO have.

1) The right level of government control is a debatable point, obviously. It’s not clear to me whether you think that state standards or national standards should rule. My point, however, is that state and national standards DO NOT rule. I specifically address not why I don’t like standards, but rather why they are weak and ineffective. If they do not rule classrooms — and they do not — then they don’t give distant governments ANY control.

2) Again, you are addressing what you want to happen. You think that there should be some common experiences. I think those things already happen, for many other others (e.g. American culture, the “grammar of schooling”, common text books, state tests, isomorphism/new institutionalism in teacher preparation). The question is not of your goal, but whether standards actually contribute to your goal.

3) Yes, people still support “accountability.” But that is not the same thing as supporting NCLB. Furthermore, you assume that there is any chance that NCLB-like accountability could work. In your longer blog post on your own site, you argue for national tests, without ever acknowledging the critical differences that I explain in #5 in how tests CANNOT match standards. The fact is that the parents who are most satisfied with NCLB are the ones whose schools and children are nowhere near the old bars of the old standards. Raising those bars, revising them, or making them more rigorous is largely irrelevant to those populations, as they are not near there yet. Communities who ARE doing much better — for whom the revisions of the standards might be more germane — are big detractors of NCLB-like accountability. Whatever arguments for well-considered rigorous standards might exist, explaining that they are the best hope for a national testing regime misses the technical issues of such a regime and the real experiences of families who have lived with it.

4) I believe that I have spent the last two weeks explaining how standards are anything BUT the most practical solution to the problem. The easiest action? Perhaps. The most obvious step for top down thinkers? Perhaps. But a solution? Not at all. A practical solution? Only if you think that a practical solution does not actually solve anything.

This series has not been about why I think standards or what they aim to accomplish are a bad idea. I have not addressed that at all. This series has been about why they do not accomplish what they aim to. You are writing about their desirability and the desirability of how they would operate in a perfect world. I have been writing about the effectiveness — in rather their complete ineffectiveness.

If anyone wants to make standards work, they’ve got to figure out how to get teachers to understand them, to think deep, long and hard about them, and to change their content and practices to meet them. Not just a few teachers, but all teachers. Distant governments do not have that kind of power, and putting out standards documents won’t change that. 3 million teachers, Corey. How do we create national standards that are relevant and useful for 3 million teachers, considering the variety of students, backgrounds and abilities of their students? How do we get 3 million teachers to think about and teach to the standards? What would it take to support such conversations and provide the supports for teachers truly engage in them so that they can figure out what they might need to do, and what kinds of supports would they need to enact those changes? In some cases — in the tens of thousands of critical cases — we are talking about radical changes in practice, right? That’s where school improvement lies.
http://www.edpolicythoughts.com Corey

I think the fundamental misunderstanding here is that I don’t think standards should be all-powerful. I’m perfectly ok with removed governments writing standards that provide only a little bit of guidance — to me, that’s close to the ideal outcome. If standards actually dictated what happened in classrooms every second of every day, then classrooms would be dangerously beholden to the political whims of state legislatures and education committees.

Let me do a point-by-point response:

1.) As I said above, I think it’s a good thing that standards don’t rule. I don’t want them to. But you also need to acknowledge that saying that they “don’t have ANY control” is factually incorrect. I have personally worked with teachers who rely heavily on the standards when deciding what to teach.

2.) I agree: national standards probably wouldn’t make the school experiences of Americans all that much more similar. But I’m okay with aiming for a worthy goal and falling short. My argument was simply that creating standards is an appropriate role for government.

3.) I didn’t say that an NCLB-like accountability system based on national testing would be the ideal system; just that it would be better than the current system based on state tests.

4.) The reason that I say “solution” which, admittedly, might be a bit strong is because it does solve at least one problem — the desire of politicians and governments to be intimately involved in what happens in the classroom. The creation of standards allows them to feel that they are, but without forcing teachers to be beholden to their whims. In other words, standards — at least in some instances — are the “least bad solution.” But I do see the argument that this also means that politicians and legislatures become complacent and avoid taking other actions that might have more positive and more powerful influences on our school.

I see standards as a good compromise between no government involvement and a scripted curriculum handed down from above. But I see your point that in other ways they may serve as a distraction from real reform. I guess the question at hand is what actions state governments would take if they realized that standards don’t matter all that much. Do they have a better solution? It’s possible, but I’m somewhat skeptical — at this point, I trust teachers more on curricular decisions than I trust state governments.
http://www.classsizematters.org Leonie Haimson

I think standards are useful to the extent that they explicitly state what content areas teachers should teach. But like the overemphasis on testing, the idea that standards alone will somehow effect positive changes in our schools or produce a quality education is misconceived. In fact, the standards movement which was very big a few years back morphed quickly into the so-called accountability movement that took over educational policy, first in states and then nationally. As many people have said before me, repeatedly weighing a pig does not make it fatter. Nor does prescribing what its diet should be.
http://MoreThoughtful.blogspot.com Alexander Hoffman

Corey,

you say that standards do “solve at least one problem — the desire of politicians and governments to be intimately involved in what happens in the classroom. The creation of standards allows them to feel that they are, but without forcing teachers to be beholden to their whims.” Ummm…

I’m tempted to agree. Sure. If that’s the problem, state or national standards are a perfectly fine solution.

Except that they are not.

There is only so much attention and energy available to school reform or improvement. There is enormous opportunity cost here. Revising, strengthening or issuing new standards do no improve the educational experience of children, but they do get lots of media attention and send signals to other that the people in power are paying attention and are on the case. You say that they act as a buffer between meddling politicians and capable teachers. I say that they act as a buffer between an outraged public and those with power.

Rather than addressing the intrinsic issues of testing regimes, they can “improve” the standards.

Rather than addressing the problem of responding with sanctions instead of building capacity, they can “improve” the standards.

Rather than thinking about what meaningful monitoring of educational processes might look like (see Rothstein et al’s recent work on educational inspectors), they can “improve” the standards.

Rather than rethink how we can provide brand new teachers with the kinds of scaffolding and support they might need to becomes thoughtful and capable professionals, they can “improve” the standards.

Rather than thinking about how the abilities and experience of our senior teachers can best be leveraged beyond the 25 or 150 students they traditionally might teach daily, they can “improve” the standards.

Those are questions that a top down approach might be able to address. They are about structure in ways that might impact the classroom, if done right. But like so many other distractors, efforts to improve standards allow the powerful to duck doing the difficult work of contributing to improving schools.

In other words, if we know that changing standards doesn’t change things at the classroom level, why are we talking about them? Why do these efforts get so much attention?
http://www.edpolicythoughts.com Corey

Like I’ve said, I agree with most of what you’re saying. Standards don’t make much of a difference, and they get way too much attention. I agree. Governments could spend their time on more worthwhile efforts. I agree.

But governments could also spend their time on less worthwhile efforts — e.g. a scripted curriculum. And since standards themselves don’t really do any harm, I remain skeptical but unwilling to denounce them.
http://MoreThoughtful.blogspot.com Alexander Hoffman

Corey,

I’m glad to see that we are mostly on the same page. But, being me, I’m still going find some things to argue about.

First, entirely tangentially, I’m not sure that I’m against scripted curricula. I think that they can be of enormous benefit to new and/or struggling teachers. Obviously, mandatory scripted curricula for all teachers seems like a very bad idea. But I think that making high quality scripted curricula available to schools would do a lot more to help education than high quality standards. Some teachers could try to use it directly, others might adapt it some, and still others could just look through it for ideas.

Second, I don’t think that I have ever actually denounced standards. Rather, I have denounced efforts to create NEW standards, and the attention that such efforts get.

Third, in her Bridging Differences column this week, Diane Ravitch addresses merit pay. She writes, “I do not see merit pay as a cure-all or even as a significant reform. It may be a distraction from the serious issues that confront our students and our schools.” Merit pay, charter schools, new and more rigorous standards. Heck most everything on the national educational agenda. I worry about the opportunity cost of all of these distractions.
http://www.thisweekineducation.com JOHN THOMPSON

I limit my contributions to what I know, which is inner cty schools, especially secondary and mostly high school. I can’t visualize a situation where standards matter in terms of our schools.

And we should remember what the prime purpose of federal efforts are; states and localities ought to be able to address their own situations in schools that aren’t so broken.

I’ve loved your way of explaining the issues, just like I loved the way Russ Whitehurst did.

And building on Whitehurst’s arguments on cost efectivenss. In fact I quoted him on standards today at TWIE because it exempliefied the best in his recent Brookings letter. It won’t be long before we regret throwing those 10s of billions of NCLB money at problems in ways that have so little potential for real improvment. “Governance” reformers basically are making the pitch, we lose money on every reform but we’ll make it up on volume once NCLB II takes effect.
http://jd2718.wordpress.com Jonathan

In mathematics the welter of local standards is a problem:
1) they are, overall, poorly written
2) they are mutually contradictory (where student mobility is high this is a problem for students)
3) they are not, in the main, college preparatory

In New York State we have the embarrassment of not having a single respected math educator working in Albany. (they bring in volunteers, but with limited scope assignments, and with no real vetting or guiding principals). We also have the embarrassment of locally defining parts of mathematics, so that there really are NYS notation, NYS methods, NYS definitions… not in education, but in mathematics.

Pre-standards mathematics in NYS was superior to what was being taught in most of the rest of the United States. But today? An argument can be made that this state, at least, would benefit from having national mathematics standards.

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October 20, 2009

Standards: Why Does Anyone Bother?

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