Teacher in a Strange Land

Twenty Questions (about Education Me)

So yeah, I'm on Facebook now, too, like 90 million other people (no--seriously--it's up to 90 million). And it sure is fun hearing about how everyone is cleaning their garage, hiring a babysitter, or getting a fat-free caramel latte (venti). I admit to succumbing to a couple of those quizzy things--Fifteen Albums that Defined My Life, What is Your Stripper Name?--but only the good ones. Frankly, I don't care where your cell phone is (in one word).

There are things I really would like to know about people, however--and not always the twenty-five "random" things they choose. Since most people who visit the Strange Land are teacher types, I have hereby created Twenty Questions for Educators. I invite you to delete my answers and post your own TQ. If you do, please link back, so I can find you and read your answers. Only number one is demographic--and the rest might require some thinking. Thinking is good

1. Teaching assignments, how long? Mostly K-12 vocal/instrumental music with sojourns in 7th grade math and ESL, 30+ years

2. Favorite Class Taught and Why? Eighth grade Jazz Band, any given year. Always last hour, always heavy on the boys, always loud and crazy--but those kids, given a few weeks of intense instruction, picked up mad skills and loved to play. Sheer exuberance, every day.

3. Worst Class Taught and Why? A class inexplicably called Enrichment, where teachers got to send middle school kids who didn't do their homework, pulling them out of their electives. My job: making them do all their homework, via coercion, threats and (very occasionally) instruction. There were usually only 8 or 10 kids present, but it was 55 minutes of resistance hell, and it wasn't my assignments they were resisting.

4. Favorite Class Taken? A graduate class, Futuristics and Education. I learned more about policy options, preferable futures and the purposes of education there than any classes in foundations or policy.

5. Favorite Education Book?   Amusing Ourselves to Death (Neil Postman). Why America is an anti-intellectual nation, and how that impacts schooling, big-time.

6. Best Teacher Buddy? Lots of choices here: Daryl Bean, my music-sharing friend--or Kirk Taylor, Most Thoughtful English Teacher Ever--or Janelle Horrocks-Boehmer, the person who taught my personal children sex ed with no-nonsense humor. And many more.

7. Best Administrator? Tom Sparrow. Only my principal one year, but he was the ultimate progressive booster, willing to try any reasonable new idea, and genuinely crazy about the kids.

8. Most Disappointing Experience? Staff meetings. Every one of them. The boredom, the boredom.

9. Most Thrilling Moment? The first time my high school band took top ratings at a festival. I was a young director and went in thinking we were a third-rate group--it was my first year, our instruments were crappy and the music I had chosen was too hard. I had giant holes in any number of sections  and only one french horn. But the kids played their hearts out. I knew, 30 seconds into the performance, that we were OK--and then we came away with the coveted first division. I also won some teaching awards, further along in my career, but that day was pure exhilaration.

10. Funniest Incident in Your Classroom? I once had a kid pee into a trumpet mute, after I said he could wait three minutes until the bell rang to use the restroom. It wasn't funny at the time. Not to me, anyway.

11. Most memorable student? This is a sad one. I had a brilliant 8th grade trombonist who wrote, spoke and thought like a wry but cynical adult. Like having an adolescent Jack Kerouac in class. I swear he was an old soul. There were problems at home. When he was in 9th grade, he took his own life, via self-immolation. That was a dozen years ago , and I'm still haunted.

12. What about unions? Essential but usually unimaginative. To have such power and resources, then regularly squander them on petty, predictable scripts. I see hopeful glimmers that Next Gen teachers will change that.

13. What about charter schools? World-class idea--the devil is in the execution.

14. What about merit pay? Thoughtful pay for performance plans: a hearty yes. Bonuses for raising test scores: dreadful idea.

15. What does "21st century learning" mean? Finally getting some ideas that have been around forever into practice: collaboration, global awareness, innovation, design. 21st century learning is not simply adding more technology or extra math and science. Nor is it incompatible with mastering a strong knowledge base. It's a real thing, however.

16. What makes a teacher "effective?" Ability to engender learning in context--a unique combination of factors that students instantly recognize, and policymakers have trouble quantifying.

17. Most overrated "reform?" Teach for America, or any other program that positions teaching as something anyone can do for two years before moving on to their real careers, rather than a complex professional occupation.

18. Best professional development? National Board Certification. Hands down.

19. Personal education hero? Terry Dozier. 

20. Priorities, if you could spend $5 billion on education?  Better teachers in high-needs schools; innovation grants for creating new kinds of schools; serious teacher development--content knowledge, leadership, instructional improvement; a policy academy where practicing educators and policymakers jointly investigated research and creative options for problem-solving.

You Didn't Have to Be So Nice

Being a first grade teacher is kind of like playing defensive tackle. Everybody says you're important, but there's no glamour in it. The entire defense rests on your  limited but crucial role: if you mess up, it starts a negative domino effect, keeping your potentially productive offense on the bench. And if you do a great job, all eyes are on what happens afterward, far down the field. Worse, as you're being underappreciated, folks are silently looking at what you do and thinking "that's not so hard."

It's not uncommon for people who start their teaching careers in the first grade to end up someplace else. The responsibility is enormous and incredibly important: you're the one who makes or breaks literacy. And half the job is simply getting the kids to do school--to share things they'd rather keep, safely pass out the scissors, sit up and pay attention, raise their hands, and not punch Jason even if he was being a poopyhead. Impulse control is a huge deal--trust me on this--and it can take many weeks and a hefty bag of tricks to establish a consistently productive learning environment. When I was teaching music in a K-4 building, I became acutely aware of the fact that first graders who are in school all day for the first time really don't behave like organized schoolchildren until somewhere around Thanksgiving. Until then, they're still kindergartners at heart. And in their minds. And especially after lunch, right before recess.

So I tried to imagine today how I'd behave if a team of scientific observers came to hang around my first grade classroom, clipboards at the ready, poised to evaluate my interactions with the kiddos and turn them into a research report. I'm thinking that I'd be aiming for organization and harmony above all. Without those, there isn't much learning. Doing so might have earned me an "inadequate" rating, however--along with three-quarters of my fellow first grade teachers, according to a new study out of the University of Virginia. The study rated 820 classrooms in 700 schools (randomly selected, one assumes, although the summary doesn't say), using "trained" raters who took note of important things like:

A teacher ignoring a student with a question would score low on "sensitivity," while a teacher who responds quickly would score high.

I have known a few six year-olds whose questions I might ignore on purpose, in the presence of a Trained Rater, but never mind. What's interesting is that based on observations (and remember--without handy standardized test data in the first grade, expounding on teacher effectiveness becomes a real researcher nightmare), only 23% of the classrooms observed were deemed "high overall quality," while 28% were "mediocre," 17% were "low overall quality" and 31% of the teachers were labeled, in essence, too nice. That is--their classrooms were positive, happy places but researchers found that

...their "low academic demand" was revealed in their tendency to not give constructive feedback - for instance, not asking students to think a little bit harder about their questions, or by making basic facts more real to students in ways that would expand their understanding of those facts.

Now that's pretty ironic--first grade teachers being accused of low academic demand because they're not taking advantage of teachable moments, in an era of scripted curriculum and Reading First fidelity monitors. Going after first grade teachers, for Pete's sake! What's next? Denying Chesley Sullenberg his retirement money?

Still, that's what nearly every commenter on the Core Knowledge Blog and Joanne Jacobs' blog did--piled on those useless first grade teachers everywhere, with their lack of intellect, poor learning outcomes and jobs that amount to glorified babysitting (I'm just quoting here, faithful readers).

Several years ago, I heard Dan Fallon of the Carnegie Corporation give a marvelous speech, based on a famous research study done at Harvard in the 1970s, comparing the long-term effects that having an excellent first grade teacher provided to one of three groups of students in a working class neighborhood. The differences between students who were randomly assigned to Miss A, Miss B and Miss C were truly stunning, especially considering that the outcomes were measured when the former pupils were adults in their 30s--including occupational success, incarceration rates and adult IQ scores. One thing that stuck out for me: although many people who had Miss B and Miss C had forgotten who their first-grade teacher was, everyone remembered Miss A.

Asked about the secret of her success, her former students and colleagues noted that Miss A never lost her temper and showed obvious affection for the children. She believed in her students' ability and made her classroom a place of confidence and hope. And that's the end of today's lesson, kids. Time for recess.

Don't Know Much About History

Our home is built on a double lot--two acres of woodland, in a rolling and heavily wooded subdivision that was once the uncultivated back end of a 300-acre farm. Behind our house, there is a wide path through thick, mature woods, leading to a small clearing. In the clearing, there is an old tree with an odd shape; it's a large tree, but it was clearly bent--nearly broken--when it was young, and it points in a sharp angle away from the clearing. I was walking through our woods with a friend who is an amateur historian once, and she pointed to the tree. Indians used to do that to trees, she said--they cracked  and bent thin new tree trunks in directional patterns, so when the tree healed, it would become a natural marker, pointing the way toward water, perhaps, or a safe route. She was sure our tree had been a signpost at one time. Which might also explain the existing broad path through the woods.

This made sense to me. We live a couple of miles from the old Grand River Trail, an ancient Indian transit route running from the southeast corner of the Michigan mitten, north and west to Lake Michigan. The trail was well-known for centuries, later becoming a plank road, then Grand River Avenue, much of which is still in use. Interstate 96 now roughly parallels the old trail.

This bit of informed speculation was enormously exciting to me. There were Indians here, a couple hundred years ago--and they changed the course of my backyard! I spent some time wandering around in the woods, trying to picture this spot in, say, 1776. It was a difficult task, with lawn mowers buzzing, the wafting smell of grilled burgers and clearly visible vinyl storage sheds in two adjacent yards. Still, it was a thrilling exercise of imagination, much more interesting than the stuff I read in fourth grade about Our Indian Heritage.

Most human endeavors have a long, layered history. There's a wonderful passage in Jack Finney's novel Time and Again, where a scientist explains that time is not linear--that what makes today, February 14, 2009, different from a Valentine's Day in 1922 or 1776 is not the passage of time, since time, as Einstein explained it, is not extinguished. What makes today 2009 is literally the millions of details that have accrued and things that have changed--technologically, physically and in human knowledge and beliefs.

The bent tree marker is there because we liked the woods too much to cut them down, but even if we had leveled our tiny forest to match our neighbors' wide lawns, that tree and its marking function are still there, metaphysically. There are places on earth, including human settlements and edifices, that have changed very little. Medieval cathedrals exist as reminders of timeless human ingenuity in the service of God, even when they're surrounded by glass and steel boxes. Nothing can ever be destroyed--only changed. That's the first law of thermodynamics.

And so it is in education. I think about this a lot, as sputtering over the economic stimulus goes on. Will it be good for education to get an infusion of cash--or will all the work of the group of people calling themselves reformers (think about that etymology) be lost if enough money flows into the system to undo their "efficiencies?" Is the reason that grand reforms don't often achieve their goals due to the fact that there are universal, immortal truths that lie under the process of education--and the rest is just inconsequential layers of change? Are the things we vehemently argue and agonize over, from the value of charter schools to the right way to prepare teachers, just ephemera, in the long run?

Here's what I think, on February 14, 2009 (subject to change, of course):

• Education, the expansion of knowledge and perspective, is a universal good.
  

• Every student I ever had, more than 4000 over 30 years, learned something, which is proof to me that all children can learn, even when they think they don't want to learn.
  

• The conceptual cornerstone under education is that people learn from other people, not from things, programs or policies. This used to be a direct process but we have put layers of technology, from the printing press to the idea of "class size," in the way of this simple idea of knowledge transmission. 
  

• You can never go wrong when you invest in education.
  

• And...buried in every policy-maker, researcher, opinion leader or taxpayer is a student, and what they think about education depends largely on who they were when they were young and in school. Some people see education through a haze of fond nostalgia--school as center of learning, important rite of passage, incubator of helpful life alliances. Others are less sanguine--school was not a place of order or intellectual nurture, life's important lessons happening elsewhere. And some people were just trying to fit in, not giving much thought now or then to what education might truly achieve in a free society, what might be learned from the metaphorical bent trees scattered over the educational landscape. Some of us embrace and build on the things we were taught, as children; others push back.

Who were you, as a student? And how has it impacted the way you see public education today? Even straight-laced conservatives may have been trying out a different persona, when they were young adults. Right, Norm?

Pretty  cosmic questions, I admit. Happy Valentine's Day.

Standards Finale: Good, Bad, but not Evil

Part of the problem in any discussion about standards is that we don't know what we're talking about. Are standards guidelines for good content organization, or important things for kids to know?  Are standards a way to acquire "scientifically-based" data on school achievement--or do they represent the sound bite most likely to emerge from a policymaker: "raising the bar?" In my experience, raising the bar usually involves shoving things that were once, say, undeniably fourth grade material into the third grade, immediately impacting second and first grades by cramming spillover stuff into their curricular cubbyholes.  All you've done is moved things around and made people anxious--you haven't improved a thing.

So--what do we really mean by standards?

Uniform Curriculum?  "If only we had a standard, detailed curriculum across this country, instead of the incoherent mishmash we have now, our kids might perform like the Finnish kids do."

Benchmarks for learning growth? "The standards include fluent memorization of arithmetic facts by grade four."

Rankings? " National standards and tests that would allow parents to know, at last, how their schools compare with schools elsewhere in the country (NY Times)."

None of these will turn the United States into a nation devoted to increased learning, civic  and intellectual engagement, innovation or progress. Or fix the economy, or get all kids into college.

They do have a national curriculum in Finland, but it's broad and general--and Finns leave instructional decisions strictly up to their (carefully selected and trained) teachers. Finland's population is almost identical to Minnesota's, incidentally--and Minnesota recently scored at top levels, comparable with the highest-scoring nations, in the 2007 TIMMS study. Minnesota credits high standards and attention to instruction for their great leaps forward. Which begs the question: Why do we not leave standards creation and enforcement to states, since they've done considerable work on them over the past couple of decades? Second question: What will happen to good work done in Minnesota (and Massachusetts, and many others) when their standards are dismantled to align with federal standards?

Benchmarks are fine--as long as there are multiple strategies for figuring out what to do when kids have not memorized their math facts at age nine. And multiple opportunities--designed by schools and teachers at ground level--to get kids moving forward. You can spend a lot of precious resources identifying kids' precise achievement levels on a data grid.

Rankings generally tell us what we already know. Quick! Name three terrible school systems. Now name three terrific schools. Now tell me how more data and ranking standards will clarify what needs to be done in those first three schools.

What we want is curriculum guidelines that broadly coordinate learning goals, arranging them into a reasonable, flexible whole to help teachers logically sequence critical skills and content for their students. A good standard will help teachers and parents recognize exemplars as well as growth. A good standard will also be nimble: keep in mind that most students used to learn to type no earlier than the ninth grade, because that's when they were "developmentally ready" to learn. The accursed bar-needing-raising can slink off into the sunset, as curriculum and delivery of instruction undergo rapid and continuous change.

One final thought on standards: I recently listened again to "Two Steps Back," a feature piece on NPR's This American Life. Reporter Ira Glass visited Washington Irving Elementary School in Chicago in 1994, and again ten years later. Here's what he found in 1994:

Washington Irving Elementary School became a model of school reform in Chicago a decade ago. The school did it without adding a ton more money. It wasn't a magnet school or charter school. Their strategy: Get the kids to enjoy reading and writing; get them glasses if they need them; give teachers control of their classrooms. Scores climbed. Students actually liked coming to school.

In 2004, after prescriptive school reforms (for example, a new mandate making teachers write, on the blackboard, the standard on which each lesson is based):

The (1994 teacher-led) reforms that had made the school a model began to unravel. Well-meaning directives from the central school board undermined what the school was trying to do. The new principal didn't quite understand why the teachers were balking at seemingly small things like writing up lesson plans. The climate in the school changes. The head of the Chicago schools, Arne Duncan, says he'll look into the problems.

Yeah, that Arne Duncan. What does he say? He says that we need to move away from a one-size-fits-all mentality, toward a culture more supportive of flexibility and innovation--one that takes excellence to the next level. (You can hear Duncan speak by moving the slider to minute 44.) From your lips to reformers' ears, Arne.

In a large system, it's easier to make everyone do the same thing, a principle well-known to anyone who's ever been in the military--or the criminal justice system.  Easier, but not necessarily better.

Thanks to my old high school buddy, graphic artist Larry Grotewohl, for the image, and the Shangri-las for the blog title.

National Standards: A Thought Experiment

A recap of my previous blog:

• Some education writers think there is now a window of opportunity to finance an expensive national  standards project.

• Mandated state content standards with correlated tests were once considered the solution to hodge-podge curriculum and low achievement rates; if they have not yielded increases in states' achievement, why will national standards and tests be any better?

•  Or is it only about state-to-state comparisons using the same tested benchmarks? If so, how will more standardized information raise achievement? Or illuminate gaps? We already know about the gaps...

• Standards that are too prescriptive and detailed don't leave room for change, differences or creativity.

• We already have voluntary, educator-created content frameworks. But we don't use them. Who's going to write --and enforce--the new standards? Or pay for the inevitable costs of new materials, assessments, data analysis and dissemination of results?

The two thorniest issues around national standards, however, are not about paying for new standards, coming to national consensus in defining essential learnings, or how results of testing will be used. They are more basic than that:

#1) How quickly will content standards become obsolete, and how much will they weigh schools down as they try to adjust to changing skills, workplace norms and global cultural shifts in our hot, crowded and flat world?

#2) In our heart of hearts, do we believe that high national standards and high-stakes national tests will really change things? Where is the convincing evidence that national standards are the next best step we can take to close economic gaps, stimulate job creation or even make America a better place to live? National standards are something that can be done--but are they the right thing to do, immediately, the biggest bang for the buck?

A thought experiment: Let's imagine that Ronald Reagan leveraged the political will engendered by the "Nation at Risk" report to get Congress to agree to a set of national standards.  The year is 1989--not quite twenty years ago--and those standards are now completed and the accompanying national tests will be rolled out shortly. Creating the standards was pure  ed-policy sausage-making and horse-trading, more drawn out and expensive than anticipated, especially when the psychometricians insisted on endless validity testing. But they're done, and in the hands of every K-12 school principal in the country. They are comprehensive, and include several new areas of study--there are standards for the burgeoning field of career education, for example. The plan is to update the standards every 10 years, using the existing standards as template, although updating standards and tests add considerable legacy expense to the original estimate of what national standards would cost. Much of the standards work has been drawn from a spate of recent, popular books on cultural literacy.

May, 1989. Superintendent Williams is walking the halls in one of the two high schools in Elmwood. He likes to enter the building through the vocational hallway, where a recent bond issue has financed state of the art facilities to meet the new standards. He passes the career education office, where students are filling out their new service learning forms, mandated by the standards and designed to enhance civic engagement. He passes the wood shop, the metal shop where boys learn skills to enter the workforce as millwrights, the health sciences room where girls can be trained as Licensed Practical Nurses, and the auto shop where two boys are on their backs under a car, changing the oil.

The business career rooms are outfitted with Selectric typewriters and dictation machines--Williams sees girls learning shorthand and transcribing dictation tapes. He is especially pleased with the broadcast studio, where students can read the morning announcements over the public address system, meeting the application standard for broadcast media; a select group of students is taking German IV via distance learning there, watching the German teacher's TV lecture, then mailing off their homework and quizzes.  To meet the new standards, there are classes in journalism, food preparation, sewing and fashion, court reporting--and an expensive darkroom for the photography class. Photography was the last addition to career cluster standards before they went to press, which pleases Mr. Williams, an amateur photographer himself.

The computer lab is just around the corner. The instructional technology standards were brand new in curricular thinking, and challenging to write—there aren't many people with degrees in instructional technology. Mr. Williams is happy that there are national standards for curriculum, however--without  them, he never would have been able to persuade the Board to buy the computer textbooks, which will drive instruction in the new standards-based technology classes for the next decade.

His computer teachers are early-adopters who know enough to fix the printers when feed wheels break down. They are happy that the new textbooks include the history of computers, with consumable workbooks labeling all parts of the machine, explaining DOS systems.  To get out ahead of the standards, Williams bit the bullet and ordered twenty blazing fast 386 models which will not need replacing for 10 years or more. They have brand-new Windows 2.0 programs; the basketball coach loaded the software for free. The lab is Mr. Smith’s proudest achievement—he got a steal on the computers at $3400 apiece with monitor and keyboard. They will teach students both Works and PC Paintbrush, which will adequately prepare them for their careers of the future, he is sure--and  meet the standards.

It is quiet in the languages and social studies hallway. Mr. Williams frowns as he sees the Government class looking at a pull-down map of the USSR.  Writing national standards for government and civics classes took longer than expected as turf war infighting slowed the process of assigning hundreds of relevant topics, facts and concepts to grade levels. The political world is changing quickly, but the new tests will assess students' knowledge of Soviet-style communism for the next ten years. The new economics class meets next door--a curriculum addition driven by the national standards.  Mr. Williams is unfamiliar with economic theory, but has seen students discussing the Laffer curve and even ethics in economics (added in light of the insider trading scandals of the 80s)--and he feels that this new knowledge will forestall ethical lapses in the future.

There is only one language lab--the standards for foreign languages were raised significantly, as language teachers saw the standards as a way to push more students into four-year programs in order to graduate with an endorsed diploma. Mr. Williams is phasing out advanced German and has decided to offer only French in a four-year block.  He rationalized the move by reminding himself that the French Club could travel to France--but his rural students were not likely to meet Spanish-speaking people in the future.

Mr. Williams smiles as he passes the library, with its state of the art theft-prevention system. It was a big chunk out of the bond money, but Mr. Williams knows that students will be using the books  in the library to meet standards for decades to come--and spreading the cost out over the 25 years of the bond, the investment made sense. His own daughter, Jennifer, is in the library, working on a term paper to meet another new national standard  for research and academic writing. She is flipping through the card catalogue (another standard) to add to the research notes she keeps on 3 x 5 cards.

As he passes through the math and science hallway, Mr. Williams thinks about the recent Education for Economic Security  and Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Acts, which increased the national focus on math and science. Combined with more rigorous standards, Mr. Williams sees a bright future for science and mathematics  education. He's especially happy that the national math standards proscribe the use of hand-held calculators, which lead, in his opinion, to mental laziness in younger students. He knows that there are now machines which can solve quadratic equations, but thank goodness ordinary high school students will never be able to get their hands on them to cheat on their exams.

He whistles as he passes the band room and art studio. The new music and art standards are drawn from the literature on core cultural knowledge--things that every American should know. Mr. Williams is in full agreement with whomever sorted the list into things that children should know--nursery rhymes, Glen Miller, Bing Crosby--and things that didn't matter. His daughter Jennifer was listening to Bruce Springsteen and a group called U2 on the radio this morning. He's an indulgent father, but he knows that this Springsteen fellow and U2 will not stand the test of time, and don't deserve study by the children in his care.

The only cloud in Superintendent Williams' day is thinking about the other high school in the district, Brightmoor, which doesn't have the facilities or equipment that Elmwood has. Brightmoor will also be remodeled and updated over the next five years, but it will be much more difficult for students there to meet the new national standards at first. Parents in Brightmoor are less involved in school activities and governance, and students there less likely to go to college, so perhaps a slight delay doesn't matter as much on that side of town. No matter--the national standards will eventually prove to be a rising tide that lifts all boats.

RIght?

National Standards: Not Now, Not Ever

Of all the great reform waves that have swept School Nation since I began teaching in 1975, probably the most useful and productive was the standards movement which bubbled up in the 1980s and was locked into place under NCLB. The idea that there should be consensus and consistency around what kids should know and be able to do, and how we might measure their learning, is more or less a no-brainer. Standards, in general, are a good thing.

Last week, however, standards veneration (wherein that generally good thing was transformed into a shiny silver bullet by a crowd of talking edheads) jumped to a new level, when the NY Times ran an article suggesting that the creation of National K-12 Content Standards (proper noun) would be a great way to use the stimulus money.  Actually, this would be a fruitful use of scarce resources for precisely one group: the same edheads who assume they would be sitting on blue ribbon committees to create those standards, then collecting yet more data to analyze and writing white papers about this experience in their spare time.

Investing a bundle of money (after we print it up, of course) in a major national standards initiative is a terrible idea. I really hate the thought that my 401k died for something so unimaginative, especially when there are much better ways to use a windfall.

We already have something like national standards—content standards and benchmarks written by professional advocacy groups like the National Council of the Teachers of Mathematics and the National Science Teachers Association.  All educator organizations, in every discipline, have created broad content frameworks—from the librarians to the tech folks to dance and drama teachers. There have even been national dustups over these—the relative weight assigned to George Washington in the social studies framework, or the ongoing pro-constructivist/pro-direct instruction math wars, for example.

Why aren’t these disciplinary specialist-created curricular outlines considered national standards? Some people think they’re based on The Wrong Stuff (and that they know what The Right Stuff is)—and some people think they’re too vague or nonspecific.  And—wait for it--they’re voluntary, and not linked to easily-administered standardized assessments, either.

I am most familiar with the National Standards for Arts Education. We adapted them in my district as our own benchmarks (before NCLB rendered district standards moot for tested subjects). They’re delightfully broad and imprecise—they describe general competencies and big ideas. Here’s a music standard for students in grades 5 through 8:Students describe distinguishing characteristics of representative music genres and styles from a variety of cultures.  

How could you love a standard like that? It doesn’t tell the teacher when kids should recognize Bach or memorize his historical period (Baroque). It doesn’t sequence content or create hierarchies (putting Bach ahead of Stravinsky or above Snoop Dogg). It doesn’t give the teacher a grade-by-grade list of “shoulds” from the vast, expanding universe of musical styles and cultures. How could something so mushy be useful?

Well—if I were teaching 7^th grade music in Detroit and bound by standards to teaching the Baroque composers in the 7^th grade, I may never get them to listen to Bach, let alone understand the majesty of his music, unless I went through the Snoop. A friend just told me a story about trying to teach To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell in an inner city HS English class. Because it was in the required standards, of course, even though it was irrelevant in the extreme to the students she had finally, finally persuaded to take their English language skills seriously.

But—what about the Confusing Mishmash Theory, generally trotted out to support National Standards? The idea that states have identified different priorities and timetables for learning content? That some states have high, challenging standards, and others are letting kids slack off? And what of the child who learns algebra in the 8^th grade, then moves to another state where she might be forced to learn it all over again in the 9^th grade?

Requiring states to set clear standards and connect them to high-stakes testing was supposed to fix the original confusing mishmash—the educational system we had for decades, where every district/school/teacher did their own thing. By standardizing curricula and developing assessments, we were supposed to raise the bar and address inadequate schools—state by state, where those setting the standards presumably knew something about the districts, and students’ learning needs and capacities.

So—how’s that working out? And what assurance do we have that a national system will be any better—considering that it will force the feds to push additional resources toward playing enforcement cop, requiring states to obtain and utilize expensive data analysis systems? And make districts all over the country buy new materials to align with another set of standards? And position the USDOE,  presumptive manager of the project, as the best judge of whether expectations are too high, too low—or just right?

Those who claim that national standards will, finally, let us accurately compare states on an equal footing are really excited about playing with huge, seductive data sets and complex statistical analysis. But in the end, don’t we already know where the trouble spots are—where schools are failing and kids are not learning nearly enough? Will new, standard curricula and cleaner data get us where we want to go?

Any child moving school to school repeatedly (and this is a huge issue) has far bigger problems than whether the kids in the third grade already know cursive when he gets there. Student transience cannot be solved by standardizing curriculum; kids who stay in one system for thirteen long years are never precisely aligned with every grade-level learning expectation. They’re ahead, or behind—or both—from time to time. If every 6^th grader in America studies the ancient Egyptians, that’s no guarantee that every 7^th grader will have any knowledge or interest in the Great Pyramids. For that, you need a good teacher. If we could standardize passionate teaching, we might be moving forward rapidly.

It occurs me to that a lot of what I’ve written, so far, doesn’t make me sound like a fan of standards—and I haven’t even addressed what I think is the most compelling argument against national standards: nothing about content should ever be set in concrete.

Tomorrow, another blog on national standards—a thought experiment about what might be different if we had written national standards twenty years ago.  Stay tuned.