The Spectacle of Standards & Summits

Starting in 2004, Virginia high school students must take a series of 11 exams, based on the SOL to graduate. In 2007, 70 percent of a school’s students must pass SOL tests for it to remain accredited—last year only 2.2 percent of Virginia schools met this standard.

Beyond the unrealistic nature of the SOL and deleterious effects of high-stakes testing on teaching and learning, a primary concern of the Virginia parents group is that the state’s reform efforts have not included local input on what students should be learning. They argue that many test items are more like Trivial Pursuit factoids than essentials and claim that Virginia’s standards reflect the views of only a few members of the state board of education rather than a consensus of broad-based groups of educators and parents.

The absurdity of many standards and test questions is not limited to Virginia. In Chicago, George Schmidt—a 30-year veteran of Chicago Public School classrooms and publisher of a monthly newspaper written by and for people who work in Chicago’s public schools—is being sued for $1 million by the Chicago Board of Education for publishing questions from the Chicago Academic Standards Examinations (after students took the tests). This item is from a social studies CASE 23. “    All of the following activities are part of a typical African woman’s life in rural areas EXCEPT”:

•     A.     preparing food
•     B.     taking care of children
•     C.     helping her husband grow cash crops
•     D.     selling crops at the market

    While Public Agenda—and perhaps the corporate leadership of the movement—considers parents to be little or no threat to standards-based educational reform, politicians appear more sensitive to the growing anti-standards, anti-testing pressures. Test boycotts and other forms of resistance have moved the governors of Michigan and California to offer students money (“scholarships” of up to $2,500) for taking or scoring well on state-mandated tests. Indiana politicians are bracing for an enormous backlash against the state graduation test, which threatens to keep 50 percent of the seniors in urban districts and a quarter of seniors state-wide from graduating this year.

Teachers are the most significant potential pitfall to the standards movement, according to the Public Agenda report. While many school administrators and the top leaders of the teacher unions are solidly on the standards bandwagon, rank-and-file teachers’ pivotal role is rightly acknowledged: “If teachers believe that standards policies are important and well thought out, they can sustain and nourish parental support. If teachers are convinced that standards policies are unfair or destructive, they can undercut parental support with extraordinary speed...District directives are often ridiculed or resented, and experienced teachers have already been through waves of reform, which in their minds produced very little of value. Public Agenda’s research strongly suggests that bringing the nation’s teacher corps firmly inside the movement to raise standards could be the most pivotal challenge of all.”

Following the lead of Public Agenda, the top agenda item at the summit was teaching, in particular devising ways in which teacher preparation and pay can be tied directly to the standardized curriculum and tests developed by states.

For their part, education leaders promised to align college-admissions requirements with state curriculum standards. The standards, which threaten academic freedom in K-12 classrooms, are now being applied to university teacher preparation programs as advocates work to create a rigid system in which the education of students and teachers is defined by interests accountable only to corporate America. As a result, the standards movement poses a threat to parents, teachers, students, and other members of local communities to define their own interests and desires and use them as platforms for deciding the content and pedagogy used in public schools.

The idea of paying teachers based on their students’ test scores, which was endorsed at the summit, is backed by Bob Chase and Sandra Feldman, the respective presidents of the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers. In the past six months unionized teachers in Denver, St. Paul, Cincinnati, and Seattle, to name a few, have agreed to some sort of pay-for-performance plan. Governor Gray Davis of California recently approved $50 million for one-time bonuses of up to $25,000 for teachers whose students show substantial test score improvement. Davis’s plan, like other teacher pay-for-performance plans, is an attack on the notion that teachers should be engaged in deciding what’s best for their students by shifting the focus from students’ welfare to teachers’ pocketbooks.

Paying teachers for student performance is not a new idea. History shows that most of the gains from such programs are destructive illusions that narrow the curriculum offered to students and encourage teachers and administrators to cheat—as we have recently seen with the high-stakes exams used in New York City public schools. In an article for Education Week, Wellford Wilms and Richard Chapleau of UCLA described pay for results schemes implemented in England, Canada, and the U.S. in the last two centuries and conclude: “Few results that are forced on the schools (especially destructive ones like pay-for-results) will ever penetrate the classroom and positively change the teaching and learning processes. Teachers are every bit as adept at deflecting or sabotaging reforms of this kind today as they were at deceiving English school inspectors in the 1800s. Politically driven reforms like pay-for-performance are nothing more than reflections of public frustrations. And rather than helping to solve the root causes of failure, they paralyze us and deflect public attention from reforming the educational systems at their core.”

    In the end, the National Education represents our hierarchical society, where citizens are made to be passive spectators, disconnected from one another and alienated from their own desires, learning, and work. The spectacle of standards, test scores, and summits obscures the role of parents, teachers, and students in decision-making public education. This spectacle expresses what society can do, but in this expression what is permitted with regard to teaching and learning limits what is possible. Ultimately, the achievement of standards-based educational reform is the preservation of the unequal conditions of existence.

The bottom-line is that the more members of local communities are allowed to decide on school curriculum and teaching methods, the more equitable and democratic the society will be. Standardized curriculum and high-stakes tests are attacks on democratic education. Organized parents, educators, students and community people have an honest stake in responding and are doing it.                              Z

E. Wayne Ross teaches in the School of Education and Human Development at the State University of New York at Binghamton. He and David W. Hursh are editors of Democratic Social Education: Social Studies for Social Change (Falmer Press).