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This and next week I am 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.

Problem #1: Which Bar to Raise?

New standards and new standards initiatives are always about raising the bar. They are always about improving education, educational outcomes and sometimes even — shockingly — improving test scores. Standards efforts are never aimed at merely documenting what is actually done.

But this goal is actually impossible to accomplish with a single bar or single standard because we know that there are all kinds of achievement gaps in this country. Yes, there are racial/ethnic gaps and income gaps. But there are also geographic gaps. The NAEP has show us that some states simply do much much better than others. Caroline Hoxby’s latest report talks about the Harlem-Scarsdale gap. Regardless of the cause of these geographic gaps, they exist.

Given such gaps between states and within states, for whom should we raise the bar? Those who call for excellence are looking to improve the top half or quarter. Those who call for equity aim to improve the bottom half or quarter. Perhaps we can do both at the same time, but wouldn’t that call for multiple bars? States like Mississippi and California could show incredible improvement and still be behind states like Massachusetts and New Jersey. Set the bar high enough to push higher achieving states or districts, and the lower achieving area will see a demoralizing and impossible goal and be that much less likely to take it seriously. Set it at a level to be realistically inspiring for lower achieving states and higher achieving states could sit on their laurels for having already passed it. The exact same issues hold true for districts and even schools.

So, a single set of standards to raise the bar? Impossible.

Next: Problem #2 — An Unrealistic Bar.

• More than 500 school aides are being laid off next week, for savings of about $13 million. (Daily News)
• High school dropouts are found to have a high rate of incarceration. (Times)
• The AFT is helping school districts build teacher evaluation systems that use test scores. (Newsweek)
• Why do teachers unions not fight charter schools like they used to? Thomas Carroll explains. (Post)
• The city’s transfer schools pair academic instruction and social services to at-risk teens. (NY1)
• The low-calorie school vending machines have officially been approved. (GothamSchools, NY1)
• Ten Long Island school administrators make more money than Joel Klein. (Newsday)
• Post readers weigh in on how the city’s negotiations with the teachers union should proceed.
• School districts nationwide are struggling to pay for their students’ lunches. (USA Today)
• Daily News readers stepped up to help the homeless family who travels hours to their schools.
• Places where H1N1 was common last year, including the city schools, aren’t seeing much now. (Times)
• Harvard is cutting back, closing a library and eliminating cookies at faculty meetings. (Times)
• Massachusetts’ legislature has 40 days to lift the charter school cap to get RttT funds. (Boston Globe)
• Paul Krugman says education budget cuts threaten America’s claim to being a great nation. (Times)
• The proposed academic standards intentionally do not suggest particular books. (Washington Post)

• NYSUT won an AFT grant to build a “meaningful” teacher evaluation system.
• Weingarten tells Newsweek that using student data in NY is ok, just not under Klein.
• Got any questions for UFT president Michael Mulgrew? Get them asked here.
• Ed in the Apple: there’s an easy way and a hard way to get the UFT and DOE to collaborate.
• Bronx Science teachers who signed a complaint letter say they’re being retaliated against.
• Thompson’s 15-second ads don’t allow him enough time to explain his Board of Ed days.
• Peter Murphy says NYSUT is offering charter school teachers more than it can deliver.
• Jeb Bush: If Walmart can track a box of cereal, we can track student achievement.
• Slowly winning over a difficult student may not show up in test scores.
• The solution to charter turnover: train kids to become charter school teachers.
• A Center on Education Policy study shows the achievement gap narrowing.
• And Politics K-12 decides to take a vote on naming RttT. Or is it RTT?

We are decades into the Education Standards Movement. Standards have been all the rage for quite some time, and they are getting all kinds of attention today. Right now, there is all kinds of work on national standards going on.

But I say, “Feh!” Standards do not matter — particularly national standards — even if we dearly want them to.

What Are Standards, Anyway?

Standards prescribe and specify what should be done in school. In that, they are similar to curricula and lesson plans. In fact, the line between standards and curricula can be hard to distinguish — as can the line between curricula and lesson plans. As a rule, however, standards are the least specific of the three, and focus on what should be taught, rather than how it should be taught.

So, standards documents describe the goals of a course or a subject. They are the bar or the target, depending on your preferred metaphor. They declare what should be taught, what students should learn and/or what they should be able to do by their course’s end.

When I was teaching in New York not that long ago, each of the English teachers in my school was required to have a poster of the ELA standards up in their classrooms. The contents were probably just a couple of pages long, and they specified what students should learn in their high school English classes.

The widely publicized Common Core draft ELA standards, released last month, can be found in a 47 page document, of which six pages comprise the standards and the rest are explanations and examples to help the reader make sense of them.

Who Creates Standards

Anyone may write standards, and can try to publicize them and get others to pay attention. Rarely, however, will such efforts be successful. Standards simply cannot have more power and authority than the organization that publishes them. NCTM (the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics) has been publishing standards for decades, and their expertise and credibility have given them a lot of weight.

However, the most important standards have been created by the states. In our system, the federal government has no constitutional role in education, in theory leaving the entire enterprise to the states. In the last fifty years, though the federal role has grown, standards have still remained the province of the states. In 1994, President Clinton tried to foster the creation of voluntary national standards, but was politically unable to do so — due to the efforts of Lynne Cheney and others. This time around, the Council of Chief State School Officers is leading the effort, along with Achieve — a creation of the National Governors Association. Thus, this time we have a national effort that is not tied to the federal government in Washington, DC.

Of course, it is not as though President Clinton, Governor Schwarzenegger or any of the State Superintendents write standards themselves. Rather, they are supporting the creation of standards by teams and committees of experts. These can include text book writers and publishers, teachers, researchers, professors of education, experts in the appropriate content areas and various others. Real people, with real expertise, real agendas — for better and for worse — and real histories.

Six Problems

Over the next week, I will explain the major problems I see with standards efforts, particularly high profile national standards.

• Problem #1: Which Bar to Raise?
• Problem #2: An Unrealistic Bar
• Problem #3: Fear of Failure Rates
• Problem #4: Classrooms
• Problem #5: Tests Matter; Standards Do Not
• Problem #6: Local Control
• Standards: Why Does Anyone Bother?

Come back through the week and share what you think of each reason. In the meanwhile, do you think that there’s a strong case to be made for strong state or national standards?

• A family travels from a Bronx homeless shelter to school in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. (Daily News)
• The complaint filed by Bronx Science math teachers is nearing arbitration. (Riverdale Press)
• The school aides who have lost their jobs are trying to figure out what comes next. (Riverdale Press)
• In Chicago, Arne Duncan and others pledged a national youth violence effort. (Times)
• Chicago is already running two research-based anti-violence programs. (Christian Science Monitor)
• Meet the D.C. teachers who just lost their jobs to controversial budget cuts. (Washington Post)
• All Mississippi students will now learn about the civil rights movement. (Christian Science Monitor)

• Arne Duncan says his turnaround strategy had nothing to do with the death of a student in Chicago.
• Vagueness about when the new RttT regs will come out is giving the Ed. Dept. headaches.
• Andy Smarick calls the exclusion of private schools from i3 “very troubling”
• Teachable Moment argues that more school choice, like more calorie counts, won’t prevent bad decisions.
• P.S. 24 in Riverdale is losing four of its school aides to budget cuts and is not happy about it.
• The new Frank McCourt school’s admissions process is still TBD, and highly anticipated.
• …And there will be CEC hearings about it in the “coming months” WNYC reports.
• A teacher lists the many difficulties of getting older teacher to use newer technology.
• What if everything we think we know about arts education turns out not to be true?
• “Whatever It Takes,” the documentary about a Bronx high school, will run on PBS in April.
• And four NBA players didn’t attend summer school to teach kids a good lesson, they’ll need the degree.

Today I was struck for the first time in a while by the absurdity of me doing what I do. My 3rd graders were walking quietly, spaced evenly in straight lines down the stairs on their way to lunch. “You guys look amazing!” I gushed. “I’m going to have a tough time deciding which line deserves a star!” I said as a smile broke across my face. And then I couldn’t help but laugh out loud.

Here I was shepherding 19 seven and eight year olds to lunch, enforcing the so, so serious rule of walking silently. Kids of this age are just a little funny looking to begin with, still chubby and small, but adding to the situation my surprise to find myself in this position, the experience felt both surreal and hilarious. With that in mind, a brief list of…

Questions and Statements I Never Thought I’d Utter:

• Am I using too much blue marker on my charts?
• I’m only going to give a star to the line that’s trying their best! (more…)